Zhu Qian Academic Research

Zhuqianzhi(1899-1972), born in fuzhou of Fujian province, is a famous philosopher and historian in china. He has embarked on academic researches for about more than fifty years, and published more than forth works which cover such fields as philosophy, history, politics, economics, literature, religion and culture. As a result, he is called an encyclopedic scholar.This thesis devides Zhuqianzhi's life of academy with three stages. The first stage is from 1917 to 1932 when Zhuqianzhi studied in Beijing and Janpan, moreover, he started to establish his own fundmental theory. At the beginning of the stage, he believed the theory of nihilism which denies and criticizes every school and everything with Chinese Taoism and Buddhism and Bergson' s philosophy of life and hegel' s thought. In fact, his theory of nihilism was one school of anarchism, so he changed his belief from nihilism to real sentimental ism when the tide of anarchy was out of date in the 1920s.At that time, Zhuqianzhi lived in Hangzhou with his lover named Yangmeilei(1898₁928). They were involved in studying literature of music, and were only interested in love and academy. With the development of national revelution, the scholars focused on social philosophy instead of life philosophy, so Zhuqianzhi started to do reseach on the principles of social development and published historical phi losophy which was the first work named historical philosophy in china. Zhuqianzhi tried to divide the history of culture with Comte's "three stages' principle"based on Bergson' s philosophy of life.The second stage of his academic life was from 1932 to 1952 when Zhuqianzhi was a professor in Zhongshan university. During the stage, he continually published a series of works on which he established his own theory of historical philosophy. He criticized the school of historical materialism with the magazine modern history that he held at his own expense. He maintained that the historical evolutionism understood by Hegelists was not periodic cycle and the comtism was linear evolutionism. Because the development of history is either rectlinear or tortuous.Only when combining both of them, can we overall recognize the developing process of history. As far as the approach of studying history is concerned, the objects to the two Rinds of extreme tendencies of the comtism and the Materialism when controulted with historical materials and concepts. It is obviously that his unique theory in the field of history has been built. In order to put his theory into practice , he also engaged into research of such developing fields as cultural philosophy, history of history, Chinese and western communication and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In his cultural philosophy, Zhuqianzhi developed Comte' s principle of "three stages" into the principle of "four stages" which devides history of culture such four stages as religion, philosophy, science and art in proper order. Culture also has religion, philosophy, science and art in category. According to Zhuqianzhi' s cultural philosophy, it's mainstream that Chinese culture influences other cultures at the stage of cultural history because Chinese culture belongs to the culture of philosophy in category. Following the theory,he wrote the work Chinese culture influencing western thought. The work is very different from most works in the field at that time which pay more attention on western culture influencing Chinese culture and textual research of historical geography. Zhuqianzhi tried to devide the history of Chinese history three stages by contrasting it with history with western history, moreover, he studied the history of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with the theory of Materialism, and explained the reasons of emergence of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from the respect of economic background, which demonstrated that Zhuqianzhi's thought was changing.From 1952 to 1972, Zhuqianzhi did his academic research in Beijing. In 1952, Zhuqianzhi was transferred to Beijing university,and studied history of Chinese philosophy. He wrote Lizhi(one famous ph...