《“On the ‘Birth’ of Historiography of ‘Philosophy’ in China”》.doc

“On the ‘Birth’ of Historiography of ‘Philosophy’ in China” Professor Han-liang Chang, National Taiwan University Paper presented at the Invited Session (IS02) of Reframing the Historiography of Philosophy: A Dialectic Approach XXII World Congress of Philosophy Seoul National University, Seoul , Korea 30 July – 5 August, 2008 Venue: IS02-2, B83 (Multimedia Lecture Building), 305 Time: 2008-08-01, 15:00-18:00 This paper gives a critical account of the early stage of writing Chinese historiographies of philosophy based on Western models in the early 20th century. The special phenomenon in textual practice, though not wide-spread and of little consequence beyond the confines of academe, bears witness to the large-scale reception of Western culture in China since the late 19th century. This kind of textual practice, albeit still novel to the Chinese intellectuals in the 1910s, had already been a specialized “independent science” (Windelband 1901: 11) in Europe for nearly a century. In response to the Invited Session’s call for paper on the topic of Reframing the Historiography of Philosophy: A Dialectic Approach, the paper sets as one of its tasks to examine the concept of “dialectic” and to propose that cross-cultural reception, imitation, and survival of the genre under discussion present a unique hermeneutic situation involving the interpreter’s constant engagement of past texts and his articulation of them in another text that is his historiography. It was Hegel who inaugurated the modern genre of Geistesgeschichte , with his strong conviction on China’s lack of philosophy and its history. Since both of the two early historiographers, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) and Feng Yulan [Fung Yu-lan] 馮友蘭 (1895-1990), make free use of Hegel in their interpretations of historical process, the paper will discuss a special version of dialectic, developed by Gadamer, in relation to Hu’s and Feng’s histories of Chinese philosophy. Postulating “the historiography of philosophy”