https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Confucius-Interpretations-Genuine-Living/dp/B0006CPC64/?tag=2022091-20
1969
https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-philosophy-its-spirit-development/dp/B0006EOBXC/?tag=2022091-20
1981
方東美
Dongmei Fang was born on February 9, 1899 in Tongcheng, Anhui, China of a family in Tong Cheng, An-hui, China, that has produced scholars, thinkers, and men of letters in Chinese classics, including several Royal Tutors at the Imperial Palace during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
From 1925 to 1948, Dongmei Fang taught at several universities in China, mostly at the National Central University (later renamed Nanjing University and reinstated in Taiwan), in Nanking and Chungking. Then he taught at National Taiwan University.
Throughout his life Dongmei Fang sought to articulate a comprehensive philosophical system, eclectically based on Chinese and Western philosophy and integrating different fields of philosophical concern. He based the possibility of individual wisdom, integrating reason and emotion, on distinctive types of common cultural wisdom. Different types of men were possible in different cultural worlds, with each world integrating value and existence. His early Nietzschean preference for Greek culture gave way to a deep appreciation of Chinese values. Fang’s metaphysics saw reality as having many facets, at least including the natural world of physics and biology and the human world of psychology, aesthetics, morality and religion. The facets were seen as organized in terms of a hierarchy of layers. According to a pattern of evolution, a more fundamental layer could develop into the next higher layer without that higher layer being reducible to the lower layer. Thus each facet of existence was granted a legitimate place in his metaphysics. Because higher layers had their own reality, they could shape lower layers as well as being shaped by them. According to Fang's philosophical anthropology, there was a pathway of human development from craft to creation to knowledge to symbol-making to morality and finally to religion, with cultural or individual movement possible in either ascending or descending direction. On this view, religion was at the pinnacle of human life and also immune front sceptical challenge. Human creativity formed the aesthetic grounding of his philosophical system, with art providing unity and integration for the different aspects of our lives, the different layers of reality and the different cultural traditions which concerned him.
Quotes from others about the person
Professor Charles A. Moore considered him the "greatest philosopher of China."
