Zhang Dongsun

Who's Who in China Suppl. 4th ed. (1933)

Zhang Dongsun ( Chinese  张东荪 , Pinyin Zhang Dongsun , W.-G. Chang Tung-sun ; YUANMING (original first name) 万田 , Wantian ; Zì 东荪 , Dongsun ; Bǐmíng (pen name) 圣心 , Shengxin ; Hào 独宜老人 , Duyi Lǎorén ; * December 9, 1886 in the Chinese Empire ; † June 2, 1973 in the People's Republic of China ) was a Chinese philosopher, intellectual and political activist.

biography

In his youth, Zhang studied the epistemology and ethics of Immanuel Kant while studying abroad and tried a reinterpretation of Confucianism based on Kant's ideas. He participated in famous discussions about the merits of "Science and Metaphysics", in which he combined himself with the then fashionable metaphysics of Henri Bergson . He was also known as a proponent of the philosophy of Bertrand Russell , whom he accompanied on a tour of China in 1920.

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Although Zhang was mentally silenced after the 1940s, he was an exceptionally prolific writer by then. Much of his work from the period has survived to this day, and testify that Zhang was one of the most influential and innovative Chinese thinkers of the 20th century. His most important philosophical works are "Science and Philosophy" (科學 與 哲學), "ABC of Philosophy" (哲學 ABC), "ABC of Psychoanalysis" (精神 分析 學 ABC), "On the Culture and Philosophy of East and West" (讀 東西 文化 及其 哲學), "Epistemology" (認識論), "A new Formulation of Pluralistic Epistemology" (多元 認識論 重述), "Knowledge and Culture" (知識 與 文化), "Thought and Society" (思想 與 社會) and "Rationality and Democracy" (理性 與 民主).

philosophy

The core of Zhang's philosophical system is its pluralistic epistemology. It is derived from a revised version of the Kantian philosophy. To justify this epistemology, he proposed a new cosmology, panstructuralism (泛 架構 主義). An important assumption of his theory of knowledge is the neo-realistic view that the external world exists independently of our consciousness and that there is no exact correlation between the external phenomena and our understandings of them. The external cause for the sensory perception is not a substance, but the order or structure of the external world. What is transmitted to us through our senses, however, is a modification of this external order. For example, the discovery of the theory of relativity was important only in the sense that structural laws were discovered, not that a new essence / substance of nature and cosm was discovered.

credentials

• Xinyan Jiang, "Zhang Dongsun: Pluralist Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy" in Chung-Yin Cheng and Nicholas Bunnin, eds., Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
• Key-chong Yap, "Zhang Dongsun" in Antonio S. Cua, ed., Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2001.
• Rošker, Jana S., "The Abolishment of Substance and Ontology: a New Interpretation of Zhang Dongsun's Pluralistic Epistemology," in "Synthetis philosophica International Ed.", 2009, Vol. 24, No 1, p. 153-165.
• Rošker, Jana S., "Zhang Dongsun's 張東蓀 (1886 - 1973) plural epistemology (duoyuan renshi lun 多元 認識論)," in Rošker, Jana S., "Searching for the Way - Theory of Knowledge in pre-Modern and Modern China, "Hong Kong: Chinese University press, 2008

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Zhang is the family name here, Dongsun is the first name.