Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was born in 1895 in a middle-class family in Shanghai, China. His father was a Christian minister. 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 founded and worked for several magazines and anthologies, such as Chinese Writers, an English publication that introduced Chinese literature to the world, and American Literature Series, a collection of translated works by western writers. He also wrote his own novels, essays, and short stories, such as The Importance of Living, The Wisdom of China and India, and Moment in Peking, which depicted the life and society of China during the turbulent times of war and revolution. He was influenced by both western and traditional Chinese literature and culture, and had a keen eye for detail and humor. He was a supporter of democracy and liberalism, and opposed communism and totalitarianism. He moved to the United States in 1936 and became a professor of Chinese literature and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as the Chinese ambassador to UNESCO from 1946 to 1948. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1964. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1976. He was regarded as one of the most influential and respected intellectuals of modern China.