12 Facts About Jin Yuelin

Jin Yuelin or Chin Yueh-Lin was a Chinese philosopher best known for three works, one each on logic, metaphysics, and epistemology.

In 1926, Jin Yuelin founded the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University.

Jin Yuelin helped to incorporate the scientific method into philosophy.

Not much work on Jin Yuelin's philosophy has been done in the West in English, although a decent amount has been done in Chinese.

Jin Yuelin was interested in Bertrand Russell's work, and in particular with two main concepts: breaking down the complex into smaller parts, which was his understanding of Russell's logical atomism, and rebuilding through the logical method, which was Jin's reading of Russell's logicism.

However Jin Yuelin can be considered a Chinese philosopher because he was most informed by Chinese philosophy, and concerned himself most with Chinese concepts, such as Tao.

Jin Yuelin's writing is intertwined with his desire to navigate the space between Chinese and Western philosophy.

Jin Yuelin sees the Western approach to philosophy as being more of a meticulous scientific and logical approach that he traces back to the Hellenistic thought in Ancient Greece.

Jin Yuelin notes that China has a long history of the study of philosophy and political science being intertwined; the philosophy of today is a more specialized and differentiated discipline.

Jin Yuelin's most accomplished philosophical writings are his three principal publications written in Chinese: Logic, On Tao, and A Theory of Knowledge.

Jin Yuelin explains the notions of Universals and Possibilities as stemming from the ideal version of concepts, which in turn stems from abstracting the concrete.

Jin Yuelin posits that the reality we feel with regard to events and objects is the realization of possibilities of those events and objects.