First Advisor

Linda A. Walton

Term of Graduation

Spring 1990

Date of Publication

6-11-1990

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in History

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

Duxiu Chen (1879-1942), Fu Yan (1853-1921), Shi Hu (1891-1962), China -- Intellectual life

DOI

10.15760/etd.6017

Physical Description

1 online resource (3, iv, 195 pages)

Abstract

The concern of Chinese intellectuals with the "idea" of modern science from the West in the transition generation from 1895 to 1923 was fundamentally a concern about "national survival" and modernity. The value and meaning that accrued to science as "method" -- as a "thinking technique" -- and to the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the "science of choice" among Chinese intellectuals of this period, was due to belief or disbelief in the power of these ideas to describe, explain, or solve the problematic of "modernity" in a Chinese context.

Yan Fu's (1853-1921) translations of Thomas Huxley and Spencer and articles about ideas from the West, with their adherence to Confucian categories of description and assumed acceptance of aspects of Confucian-Taoist cosmology set the stage for much of the discussion for and against modern science, and evolutionary thought in particular, among social thinkers that was to follow. In the influence of Yan's notions of the meaning and role of modern science in China on the liberal Hu Shi (1891-1962) and the republican-turned-communist Chen Duxiu (1880-1942), a clear trend emerges. An examination of the essays of Hu and Chen written between 1915 and the journalistic polemic on "Science versus Metaphysics" in 1923 reveals that their views represent further development of strains in Yan's thought whose consequences had been insufficiently explored or about which he had been ambivalent. The trend of thought represented by Yan Fu, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu, with its belief in the transvaluative power of "scientific thinking" and increasing subsuming of a Chinese or Western "essence" (ti) in the usefulness (yong) of a borrowed idea or technique, was not a clean break with the native Chinese philosophical tradition. Though they would come to promote radically divergent views, by relying on ideas from the science and philosophies of the West to solve China's problems, while casting their presentations of these ideas in traditional Chinese philosophical terms, these three figures all managed to "face both ways."

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Comments

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/23761

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