In this class, I will introduce Feng Youlan's philosophical ideas to everyone. We used a title that Mr. Feng himself once used to summarize his thoughts, called "Clarifying the Old State to Assist the New Destiny, Extremely High and Middle Way". We used it to summarize Mr. Feng's thoughts. Why is it so summarized? And what are the reasons for the summary?
We will continue with the following discussion later. The United States once published a reference book on philosophy, called The Philosopher's Guide, which includes historical philosophers, especially some philosophers who have emerged in the last century. The Chinese with such academic background who can be selected in the Philosopher's Guide have only three people in China's study in the 20th century, Kang Youwei, Mao Zedong and Feng Youlan.
According to the standards of American philosophical reference books, we may not fully agree with these three thinkers. To summarize these three thinkers as philosophers, we will accept this standard for now.
Among these three thinkers, in a purely academic sense, Mr. Feng Youlan is more suitable for this standard and choice in academic creation compared to Kang Youwei and Mao Zedong. At the end of the 20th century, the most famous higher education publishing house in the United States, the Higher Education Press, organized the publication of a book called "Exploring Cross Cultural Readings of Philosophy". The editors of this book generally have teaching and research experience from different cultural backgrounds, and compared to the previous standard, the next standard is relatively more academically authoritative. They mainly aimed to write a philosophy textbook in a global context, so this comprehensive textbook was widely distributed in more than 20 countries and regions. Therefore, in this textbook, it screened philosophers throughout Chinese history, and a total of seven Chinese philosophers were selected.
You can see that each of you has your own preference, and choose this based on your own preference. This textbook was selected and distributed to more than 20 countries around the world. In the end, it was chosen by everyone to take a look at the candidates, including Huineng, Wang Fuzhi, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Xunzi, Laozi, and Feng Youlan. Among them, Confucius was not selected. Why wasn't Confucius selected?
Among them, Taoism and Buddhism were respectively selected, especially a representative figure of Chinese Zen Buddhism, Laozi, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Song Ming Neo Confucianism. In addition, a modern Feng Youlan was chosen as one of the seven selected candidates. It can be seen that there is a significant deviation between the opinions of the majority and this. Let's not worry about why they chose such characters for promotion. Purely speaking, among the Chinese philosophers of the entire 20th century, only Mr. Feng Youlan was selected.
The two materials selected are mainly to illustrate that Mr. Feng Youlan is very familiar to everyone. As students of Chinese philosophy, we have been greatly influenced by Mr. Feng. However, from a broader perspective, that is, from the system of world philosophy, many people regard Mr. Feng as a representative of Chinese philosophers and a philosopher with global significance. This is also a special reason why we selected Mr. Feng as a contemporary Chinese philosopher to introduce him, because compared to other philosophers, he has a greater global influence and made very important contributions in 20th century Chinese philosophy.
Today, we will introduce Mr. Feng Youlan's system to you through this introduction system in three classes.
The first one is to briefly introduce Mr. Feng Youlan, his simple history, and some of his own works. Then, through the Three Histories' interpretation of the present and ancient, as well as the Six Books of Ji Zhenyuan, we will respectively introduce his relationship with the history of Chinese philosophy and the new system of Neo Confucianism he created.
The third class is also a very important one, which is to introduce Feng Youlan's thoughts on the research methods of Chinese philosophy, as well as his understanding of philosophy itself. He believes that philosophy is a realm of life and a useful knowledge. It is to introduce some basic ideas he has about the realm of life.
So we roughly sorted out Mr. Feng's thoughts in a linear manner through these three classes. Regarding Mr. Feng Youlan's works, I still hope that everyone can read them during their spare time, so that they can better integrate with the classroom lectures.
Let's first briefly introduce Mr. Feng, an important figure, his life experience, and his book and works.
Why do I want to introduce my life experience? Because like Mr. Feng, we are also classmates studying philosophy, so we may become a philosopher with world influence like Mr. Feng Youlan in the future. Therefore, someone like him is not only a philosopher, but also learning some of his research methods, research ideas, and research processes from a philosophical predecessor. This will not only be helpful for everyone's learning, but also for their life development.
Mr. Feng Youlan was born in 1895 and passed away in 1990. His courtesy name was Zhisheng and he was from Tanghe, Henan. Generally speaking, we define him as an extremely important, influential, and controversial philosopher and historian of philosophy in the 20th century.
Attention everyone here, we use two concepts to summarize it: one is called a philosopher, and the other is called a historian of philosophy. Why do we not only call him a philosopher but also a historian of philosophy? Today, we will specifically talk about his important connection with the history of Chinese philosophy.
Mr. Feng enrolled in the Department of Chinese Philosophy at Peking University in 1915, which is now known as the Philosophy Department. At that time, it was still part of the Philosophy Department and he lived in the early days of the establishment of the Philosophy discipline. He became one of the earliest students to be admitted to study Philosophy as a major, as well as Chinese Philosophy as a major. Therefore, he is different from many people. He is a professional worker, a philosopher, and has received systematic training in philosophy.
From 1919 to 1924, around the time of his undergraduate graduation, he went to study in the United States and obtained a doctoral degree from Columbia University in 1924. He received good philosophical training in the United States and after 24 years, he served as a faculty member at Zhongzhou University, Guangdong University, Yanjing University, and Tsinghua University. He also served as the dean of the School of Literature and the head of the Philosophy Department.
So if you go to the basement of the History Department of Tsinghua University now, you can see a library owned by Mr. Zhu Feng Youlan. After Mr. Feng passed away, all of his books and some related letters were collected in such a library. If you are interested, you can go and take a look at some of his books, which have some of his annotations on them. It is very helpful.
During the War of Resistance Against Japan, Mr. Feng worked as a professor in the Philosophy Department of Southwest Associated University and also served as the dean of the School of Literature. 46 years later, he went to the United States as a visiting professor. From 1948 to 1949, he had already served as the chairman of the Tsinghua University Council and obtained honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Delhi in India and Columbia University in the United States. 56 years later, he transferred from Tsinghua University to Peking University and returned to teach as a professor in the Philosophy Department of his alma mater. In 1982, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Columbia University.
This process, basically a simple life experience, is a journey of a philosophy major student who has received good philosophical training, studied in the United States and received world philosophy training, and returned to work as a philosophy researcher. In his life journey, he wrote a very rich collection of works, roughly listed in chronological order. Among them, one that may be very familiar to everyone is this work, which teachers often introduce to everyone when they enter philosophy. In the 1940s, he published a work in English called "A Brief History of Chinese Philosophy". In the preface of this work, he said, "In small scenes, form and spirit are self-sufficient, not the whole history is in the chest, easy to overcome.
Although called A Brief History, this book is different from the history of Chinese philosophy and its new edition that we will introduce. It is a very simple work that introduces the development of Chinese philosophy history. However, although it is a brief history, it is necessary to introduce very complex philosophy in very simple and concise words. Without a profound philosophical accumulation and understanding, it is impossible to write this book. Moreover, the most important thing is that it was originally written in English and later translated into Chinese. Therefore, the book that is often seen on the market is a reference between Chinese and English.
Especially, I suggest that everyone read the English version. You will feel that reading Chinese philosophy in English will give you a different perspective and different ideas. When Mr. Feng first wrote this book, he just wanted to introduce the history of Chinese philosophy to the world. Later, this book became a universal textbook for countries around the world to learn Chinese philosophy. Not only for countries around the world, but I believe that now when we are beginners in Chinese philosophy, we also recommend it to everyone. If possible, let's read "A Brief History of Chinese Philosophy" carefully.
In fact, in 1934, Mr. Feng wrote a book called "The History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume One and Volume Two", which is a widely influential work in the history of Chinese philosophy and made a very important contribution to the discipline construction of Chinese philosophy history.
Let's take a look first. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mr. Feng put in a lot of effort to write a series of books, totaling 57 volumes, called "New Compilation of Chinese Philosophy History". We previously mentioned that we would introduce three histories, namely "The History of Chinese Philosophy", "A Brief History of Chinese Philosophy", and "A New Compilation of the History of Chinese Philosophy". These three histories are a systematic compilation of the first two histories after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and relatively speaking, as you can see, compared to the top and bottom histories, they have a larger volume, more listed characters, and richer content of exposition. Therefore, it is his great effort to write such a brief history, which is also his most important representative work after the founding of the country.
