Background
Hou Wailu was born in 1903 in Pingyao, Shanxi Province, China.
(Volume Four II (Chinese Edition) This book with more tha...)
Volume Four II (Chinese Edition) This book with more than 500,000 words mainly describes the development of philosophy from the period of Zhu Xi of Southern Song Dynasty to the end of Ming Dynasty. The author adopting the Marxist view and method in the principle of combining history and logic together tries to combine the researches on the Chinese ancient social history and philosophy history together to make systematical collocation and investigation to the philosophy courses during from the period of Zhu Xi of Southern Song Dynasty to the end of Ming Dynasty, especially to make comprehensive and intensive description to the important philosophical trend and the thoughts of pathologists such as Zhu Xi, Lu Xiangshan, Chen Liang, Ye Shi, Huang Zhen, Deng Mu, Wang Yangming, Wang Tingxiang, Huang Guan, Lv Kun, Wang Gen, He Xinyin, Li Zhi, Fang Yizhi, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/General-History-Chinese-Philosophy-Four/dp/7010089566/?tag=2022091-20
侯外庐
Hou Wailu was born in 1903 in Pingyao, Shanxi Province, China.
(Volume Four II (Chinese Edition) This book with more tha...)
From the 1940s Hou Wailu gained widespread respect for his large-scale studies using Marxist methodology to understand ancient Chinese thought and culture, according to the principle that social existence determined the social meaning of political and philosophical thought. His great strength was his ability to integrate excellent historical and philosophical scholarship within his methodological framework. His concern to compare Chinese and European thought produced two major studies.
In the first he claimed that from a Marxist perspective the intellectual achievements of ancient China were greater than those of Ancient Greece; in the second he argued that the achievements of Chinese thought since the seventeenth-century were comparable to those of the Renaissance.
These claims, supported by imaginative scholarly detail, helped to legitimate the continued study of ancient philosophy after Liberation in 1949 by incorporating Chinese experience within a Marxist historical perspective and by countering claims that the Chinese intellectual inheritance, unlike the thought of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, was an inadequate foundation for entry into the modern world.