The Generation Of Universality Road

Against the background of modern interaction between Chinese and Western thought, Y. L. Chin knew clearly about what we had, and what we hadn’t in traditional Chinese philosophy. For him, Chinese philosophy is devoid of a conscious pursue of universality, which is a hallmark of western philosophy. To consolidate the consciousness in Chinese philosophy, Chin focused most of his philosophical thinking on this subject, for example, three of his major works, Logic, On Tao, Epistemology. discuss the same topic respectively from perspectives of logic, ontology and epistemology. Among which the most distinctive one is his study of epistemology.As is well known, the mainstream in history of philosophy always take universality as a necessary dimension to formulate theory of knowledge. Although holding the same position, Chin, as a creative philosopher, is not satisfy with only repeating these people’s doctrines, he wanted to go further in this field. The original contributions he made manifested in two aspects:firstly, he asserted that empirical knowledge could be universal, which was often denied by traditional empiricists, such as Hume, who denies the existence of idea as abstract entity, therefore empirical knowledge cannot be attained with certitude and universality. Secondly, universality of knowledge should be double warranted by its form and material, the relation of knowledge’s content is originated from the relation of universals, and following logic has to be presumed to make sense of the relation of content Therefore, Chin was not entirely agree with Kant’s way to save universality, in Chin’s view, the Kantian concept of universality is guaranteed by form of knowledge (as forms of intuition and categories of understanding), instead of its materials.This dissertation lays bare a detailed depiction on Y .L.Chin original understanding of universal knowledge. Chapter Ⅰ consists of an analysis of how he ascertained the new basis of universal knowledge, and how the relation between the outer world and its related idea could turn to be the source of universality. Chapter Ⅱ discusses the way of obtaining universality of knowledge, and explores its intension. Chapter Ⅲ answers how to obtain the knowing-why and knowing-thing when knower use idea to regulate the given, and discuss the possibility of this regulation. The last chapter concerns the content of universality of proposition, and its criterion of truth.