Feng Youlan was a Chinese philosopher, historian, and writer who was instrumental for reintroducing the study of Chinese philosophy in the modern era.
11 Facts About Feng Youlan
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Feng Youlan was born on 4 December 1895 in Tanghe County, Nanyang, Henan, China, to a middle-class family.
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Feng Youlan studied philosophy in the China Public School in Shanghai, between 1912 and 1915, a preparatory school for college, then studied in Chunghua University, Wuhan and Peking University between 1915 and 1918, where he was able to study Western philosophy and logic as well as Chinese philosophy.
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Feng Youlan went on to teach at Chinese universities including Jinan University, Yenching University, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
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Feng Youlan's speeches extolling the utopian possibilities of communism, although describing the mistakes he saw, drew attention from Chiang Kai-sheks's police.
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Feng Youlan was arrested and spent a short time in jail, but soon became a firm supporter of the government and its resistance to Japan.
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Lixue was a philosophical position of an important group of twelfth-century neo-Confucianists ; Feng Youlan's book took certain metaphysical notions from their thought and from taoism, analyzed and developed them in ways that owed much to the Western philosophical tradition, and produced a rationalistic neo-Confucian metaphysics.
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Feng Youlan developed, in the same way, an account of the nature of morality and of the structure of human moral development.
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When, in 1946 the three Universities returned to Beijing, Feng Youlan instead went to the US again, this time to take up a post as visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Feng Youlan served as President of Tsinghua University from December 1948 to May 1949 because of Zhang Dongsun's refusal.
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Feng Youlan's friends tried to persuade him to stay, but he was determined to return; his political views were broadly socialist, and he thus felt optimistic about China's future under its new government.