Jin Yuelin

Jin Yuelin was a Chinese philosopher and logician who was born in Changsha, Hunan in 1895. He studied philosophy in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beijing, where he was exposed to both Western and traditional Chinese philosophy and logic. He traveled to the United States in 1919, where he studied at Columbia University under John Dewey, the pragmatist. He received his PhD in 1923 with a thesis titled "A Comparative Study of Life Ideals". He returned to China and taught at various universities, including Jinan University, Yenching University, and Tsinghua University, where he became the chair of the Department of Philosophy. He published his best-known and most influential work, his History of Chinese Philosophy, in 1934, which presented and examined the history of Chinese philosophy from a modern perspective. He also attempted to create a reconstructed version of Chinese philosophy that could respond to the modern situation, by integrating the traditional Neo-Confucianism of Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi with the philosophical traditions of the modern West. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1949 and moved to Beijing in 1952. He became the director of the Foreign Languages Publishing House and the editor-in-chief of Chinese Literature, a magazine that promoted socialist realism. However, he was denounced as a rightist in 1957 and sent to a labor camp for 20 years. He was politically rehabilitated in 1979 and resumed his literary career. He died in Beijing at the age of 89 in 1984. He was regarded as one of the most important and prolific writers of modern Chinese philosophy and culture.