Feng Youlan

Feng Youlan (1895-1990) was a Chinese philosopher, historian and writer who played a key role in reviving the study of Chinese philosophy in the modern era. His work blends the Confucian tradition with tools drawn from Western philosophy, which is why it remains a useful reference for understanding how China engaged with Western thought.

Born in 1895 in Tanghe County, Henan, into a middle-class family, he studied in Shanghai, Wuhan and Beijing before going to the United States. At Columbia University he became a student of John Dewey and earned his PhD in 1923. He taught at several Chinese universities and in 1934 published his two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy while at Tsinghua. It became the standard work in its field, although its reading of Chinese thinkers bore the marks of the positivism fashionable at the time.

After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1935 he gave speeches praising the utopian promise of communism, and he was briefly jailed as a result. He later sided with the government in its resistance to Japan and backed the New Life Movement. In 1939 he published New Rational Philosophy, which drew on twelfth-century neo-Confucians such as Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, and on Daoism, to build a rationalist neo-Confucian metaphysics. He also developed an account of morality and of how moral growth unfolds.

After 1946 he spent time in America again and watched the communists take power with cautious hope. Back in China, however, the political climate fell short of what he had expected. By the mid-1950s his approach was under attack, and he had to repudiate much of his earlier work and rewrite his History to fit the ideas of the Cultural Revolution. Even so, he chose to stay in China, and he died in Beijing in 1990.