Loading article…
馮友蘭（中国語:馮友蘭、ウェード式: Feng Yu-lan、1895年12月4日- 1990年11月26日）は、近代における中国哲学研究の再導入に尽力した中国の哲学者、歴史家、作家である。初期の研究では、ボッデ訳『中国哲学史』や陳永才の著作で使用されている「馮友蘭」という名前で出版・議論された。世紀末になっても、彼の著作はこの名前で出版され続けた。[ 1 ]
馮友蘭は1895年12月4日、中国河南省南陽市唐河県の中流家庭に生まれた。妹は馮元君で、後に著名な中国作家となる。馮友蘭は1912年から1915年まで上海の中国公立学校（大学進学準備校）で哲学を学び、その後1915年から1918年まで武漢の中華大学（後に華中師範大学に統合）と北京大学で学び、中国哲学だけでなく西洋哲学や論理学も学んだ。
1918年に大学を卒業後、1919年に渡米し、ボクサー賠償奨学金制度を利用してコロンビア大学で学んだ。そこで、後に彼の思想とキャリアに影響を与えることになる多くの哲学者の中でも、プラグマティストのジョン・デューイと出会い、彼を師と仰いだ。フェンは1923年にコロンビア大学で博士号を取得した。博士論文のタイトルは「人生理想の比較研究」であった。
彼はその後、暨南大学、燕京大学、北京の清華大学など中国の大学で教鞭を執った。1934年から1938年（そして1946年から1949年にも）清華大学哲学科の主任を務めた。[ 2 ]清華大学在任中に、馮は最も有名で影響力のある著作となる『中国哲学史』（1934年、全2巻）を出版した。この中で彼は、当時流行していた西洋哲学の風潮に大きく影響を受けた視点から中国哲学の歴史を提示し、考察した。その結果、オックスフォード大学のピーター・J・キングが述べるように、彼が記述した哲学者のほとんどに明らかに実証主義的な色合いが見られるようになった。それにもかかわらず、この本はその分野の標準的な著作となり、中国思想への関心を再び高める上で大きな効果を発揮した。
In 1935 Feng, on his way to a conference in Prague, stopped briefly in the Soviet Union and was impressed with the radical social changes and cultural ferment. His speeches extolling the utopian possibilities of communism, although also describing the mistakes he saw, drew attention from Chiang Kai-sheks's police. Feng was arrested and spent a short time in jail, but soon became a firm supporter of the government and its resistance to Japan. During the Sino-Japanese War he published works which supported the New Life Movement for revitalizing Confucian values.[3]
In 1939, Feng brought out his Xin Lixue (New Rational Philosophy, or Neo-Lixue). Lixue was a philosophical position of an important group of twelfth-century neo-Confucianists (including Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi); Feng's book took certain metaphysical notions from their thought and from taoism (such as li and tao), analyzed and developed them in ways that owed much to the Western philosophical tradition, and produced a rationalistic neo-Confucian metaphysics. He also developed, in the same way, an account of the nature of morality and of the structure of human moral development.
When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and staff of Beijing's Tsinghua and Peking Universities, together with Tianjin's Nankai University, fled their campuses. They went first to Hengshan, where they set up the Changsha Temporary University, and then to Kunming, where they set up Southwest Associated University. When, in 1946 the three Universities returned to Beijing, Feng instead went to the U.S. again, this time to take up a post as visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent the year 1948–1949 as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. He served as President of Tsinghua University from December 1948 to May 1949 because of Zhang Dongsun's refusal (it was known as National Tsinghua University until January 1949).[4]
While he was at Pennsylvania, news from China made it clear that the communists were on their way to seizing power. Feng'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.
Once back home, Feng began to study Marxist–Leninist thought, but he soon found that the political situation fell short of his hopes; by the mid-1950s his philosophical approach was being attacked by the authorities. He was forced to repudiate much of his earlier work, and to rewrite the rest – including his History – in order to fit in with the ideas of the Cultural revolution.
Despite all this, Feng refused to leave China, and after enduring much hardship he finally saw a relaxation of censorship, and was able to write with a certain degree of freedom. He died on 26 November 1990 in Beijing.