Background
Chan, Wing-tsit was born in 1901 in Guangdong Province, China.
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Wing-tsit Chan
Edit ProfileEducation
Lingnan University, Guangzhou, and Harvard University. Infts: Zhuangzi, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming.
Career
Dean of Faculty, Lingnan University. Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii. Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College.
Professor of Philosophy, Chatham College: Adjunct Professor, Columbia University. Cofounder East -West Philosophers Conference, Honolulu. Editorial and advisory board member.
Philosophy East and West.
Views
Chan’s Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (1963) and Feng Youlan's famous histories stand as the most significant surveys of Chinese philosophy for English-speaking readers. Their main rival. Sources of Chinese Tradition ( 1960), was edited by Chan with the Columbia University sinologists W. T. De Bary and B. Watson. Although Chan was born and educated in China, from 1936 his academic career was spent in the USA, principally at Dartmouth College. He saw the neo-Confucian traditions of Zhu Xi’s rationalism and Wang Yangming’s idealism as central to understanding Chinese thought and culture and devoted himself to major annotated translations of their writings, but he also saw the need to raise the study of earlier work, particularly that of the great pre-Qin dynasty schools, to a high scholarly standard of translation and commentary for Western readers. The Sourcebook, providing Chan’s own translations, aimed at uniform renderings of philosophical terms throughout. Chan recognized the importance of articulating the concepts and doctrines of daoism, Buddhism and other Chinese schools to supplement his exegesis of the main tradition of Confucian humanism and to give a balanced account of Chinese thought as a whole. His scholarly studies of Chinese religion added to his sense of the complexity of Chinese intellectual culture. Chan took an interest in modern Chinese philosophers, such as Kang Youwei and Hu Shi, and introduced Xiong Shili and Feng Youlan to English-speaking readers. His appreciation of Feng's rationalist neo-Confucianism was tempered, however, by his rejection of Feng's construction of tradition from the standpoint of his own creative philosophical work. Chan regularly contributed to encyclopedias and journals, especially Philosophy East and West. His journal contributions ranged from broad sketches of Chinese philosophy and religion to detailed historical analyses of key neo-Confucian concepts, such as ren or li(principle), and of Buddhist thought. In his eighties, his work returned to Zhu Xi, the figure inspiring his own deepest philosophical response.
