Category and Meaning [microform] : a Critical Study of Feng Youlan's Metaphysics

Download or read book Category and Meaning [microform] : a Critical Study of Feng Youlan's Metaphysics written by Derong Chen and published by Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. This book was released on 2005 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The results of our analysis show that Feng has overcome the traditional dualistic division between the metaphysical and the physical by inserting between the realm of truth and myriad things a realm of actuality. Our further analysis has also demonstrated that, Feng, by overloading empirical terms with metaphysical meaning in his metaphysical categories, is still continuing the metaphorical metaphysics in Chinese philosophical tradition. The larger contexts in which they appear and by which their meanings are specified are not at all purely logical propositions/discourses. Therefore, Feng has not successfully built up a logical metaphysical system, and what he has achieved is still a metaphorical metaphysics. Feng Youlan's (1885--1990) metaphysics is the theoretical foundation of his entire philosophical system. The main problematic this dissertation critically deals with is whether he has successfully built up a purely logical metaphysics as he claims to have. We continue the research program in the line of philosophy of language started by Angus Graham and Chad Hansen, and develop in Chapter One an approach of "systematic analysis" that analyzes the meaning and the abstractness of a Chinese metaphysical concept (term) by putting it back into the proposition (sentence), those of a proposition back into the discourse, and those of the discourse back into the system, in which they appear. With this approach, we characterize Chinese metaphysical thought, in contrast to the logical/speculative metaphysics in the West, as a kind of "metaphorical metaphysics." Employing this approach, we have analyzed the meanings, features and logical rationality of Feng's metaphysical categories of the "realm of truth" and the "realm of actuality" in Chapter Two, li and qi in Chapter Three, and dao ti and da quan in Chapter Four. We have also explored, in Chapter Five, the ethical application of his metaphysics that redefines and reconstructs Confucian theories of human nature, virtues, human relationships, and the meaning of human life by his new metaphysics and his theory of four realms of human life crowned by what he calls "the realm of heaven and earth."In the process of our systematic analysis, we have also proposed our theory of property, our justification of the logical rationality of the so-called "unthinkable" and "unfathomable" deemed by other scholars as mystical, and also our proposal of a "realm of humanity" to be inserted into Feng's "realm of morality" and "realm of heaven and earth," thereby to render the meaningfulness of human life more complete.