Dai Zhen Re-known Philosophical Studies

In surrounding of the textual researches of 18th century, the appearance of Daizhen's philosophy was a bright feature. The research's object of this dissertation is the characteristic of Daizhen's emphasizing on knowledge. Through analyzing the causes, backgrounds and performance of it's emerging, I discuss its significance in Chinese philosophy.The basic points of view in this dissertation is, Daizhen's emphasizing on knowledge displays in the basic formation of his philosophy. Daizhen's philosophy can be regarded as emphasizing on knowledge. The appearance of this philosophy formation had a trend, which made Confucianism change from moral ontology of Neo-Confucianism (a rationalistic Confucian philosophical school that developed during the Song and Ming Dynasties) to epistemology based on naive realism. Emphasizing on knowledge is the way that Daizhen toke it in order to be out of the Neo-Confucianism. Daizhen 's effort caused transferring of philosophy's core objectively, and displayed modem character in a certain sense.In the introduction, I stress that Daizhen's philosophy toke confirming significance of external object as a starting point consideration, and discussed the problems belong to moral ontology in Neo-Confucianism such as "good", "Li" and "Too", and involved almost all problems of Confucianism. The basic perform of emphasizing on knowledge is using knowledge to discuss good. It's spread out tow aspect. The first is emphasizing to recognize objects accurately. The second is emphasizing to understand Confucian classic literatures.In chapter one, I study the academic background in which Daizhen's emphasizing on knowledge arose. In this chapter, I argument three factors actuated the arising of Daizhen's philosophy. The first is ideologists during later Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty animadverted to Neo-Confucianism. The second is the arising of textual research. The third is the effects of science, especially of western science. All the above factors together made the academic field of Qing Dynasty arose losing of moral rational and raising of intellectual rational.In chapter two, I study the concept of "xue qi xin zhi". The raising of this concept had marked significance in Daizhen's philosophy, and indicated that Daizhen's philosophy started breaking through moral ontology of Neo-Confucianism into the formation of epistemology. This concept is the ties of theory of human nature, the nature laws, and epistemology of Daizhen's. The immediate cause of this concept's raising is to oppose "mind is Li" of Neo-Confucianism. Daizhen's philosophy integrated "xueqi" with "xinzhi", emphasizing both the significance of natural human as a subject and the characteristic of thereason that human is human. Daizhen transferred the heart of philosophy into how to play the biggest role of "xinzhF. He considered "xinzhi" as the most important characteristic of human nature. He not only reformed the theory of human nature, but also established the independent value of knowledge relative to moral. This changed the developing trend of Confucianism when the classic philosophy was to be end.From chapter three to chapter five, I discuss the performance of Daizhen's emphasizing on knowledge. Although Daizhen s emphasizing on Knowledge performs his philosophy's formation, he was not to establish a pure knowledge system, while trying to solve the problem of moral reliability of Confucianism in the frame of seeking knowledge. He considered understanding good as seeking to correct knowledge. The reason Daizhen could solve the problem of understanding good in the frame of epistemology is relate to the characteristic of his epistemology and his special describes to good. Firstly, he established reliable knowledge on "mind can understand the laws", emphasizing the subject of recognition has the abilities to understand all the laws of objects, and break free from the unified "xin-li " structure of Neo-Conjucianism. Secondly, he endowed the concept of "good" a new meaning. As a concept indicating the human chara...