The Research On Yan Fu’s Scientific Thought

Yan Fu (1854-1921) is known as the Enlightenment thinker of modern China. As one of the first navy overseas students, his historical achievements are vigorously spread with modern western civilization. He made great achievements on profoundly reflecting traditional Chinese culture and widely spreading modern western civilization, which certainly played the role of enlightening during the transition from traditional China to modern China. For hundred years, Yan Fu’s thought has been intensively discussed in academic circles and made great academic achievements on political, ethnical, and educational thought. This dissertation will mainly focus on Yan Fu’s scientific thought, which occupies an important position in his ideological system.This dissertation includes three parts:introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction focuses on the feasibility, research significance and some related surveys, assumes the difficulties that may encounter, preliminarily analyzes the guideline, and roughly outlines the whole framework. The above points have laid the epistemological and methodological foundation for effectively promoting the research on Yan Fu’s thought on science.Chapter One mainly discusses the background of Yan Fu’s scientific thought, including the ideological and cultural background and personal education background. As for the ideological and cultural background, the paper chooses to take the practical tendency of scientific culture localization as the perspective, which not only reflects the feature of times, but also has close relationship with the formation of scientific thought. The paper believes that the practice of scientific culture localization provides the opportunity for Yan Fu to accept western natural science and theories of philosophy. However, on the formation of Yan Fu’s scientific thought, it is returned to historical practice of scientific culture localization. Yan Fu’s education background includes Chinese academic education and Western academic education, each is divided into several different stages. They have played a direct or indirect role in the formation of Yan Fu’s scientific thoughts. The analysis of the above background provides an important side for recognizing Yan Fu’s thoughts on science.Chapter Two mainly discusses Yan Fu’s view of nature and philosophical thought on evolution. Yan Fu’s view of nature is rich in content:he boldly assumes the existence of "Taisu substance", and makes a materialist explanation towards the universe in the explanation of "Tao" and "Qi". After discussing time-space, he put forward the viewpoint of no Creator in the origin of everything in the universe, and demonstrates the continuous evolution of the universe. As for the relationship of human and nature, he showed positive attitude for human’s attachment to the nature, and also gave full play of human’s initiative. The view of nature is one of the most important aspects in Yan Fu’s ideological system, its formation needs great philosophical thought basis, that is the basis of western modern evolution, especially Darwinian evolution, and evolutionary philosophical thought formed by interpreting Spenser’s universal evolutionism and social organism theory, Huxley’s philosophy thought, and the idea of traditional Chinese culture. The essence of Yan Fu’s evolutionary philosophy is the relationship between "Ruling of Nature" and "Ruling of Human". Evolutionism and natural selection from "Ruling of Nature" promoted by him into "Tao" in nature, thereby he expanded the sphere of application of evolution by nature to the field of human society belongs to "Ruling of Human". On the other hand, he emphasized on bring into play initiative of "Ruling of Human" on the premise of following "Ruling of Nature, ruled by Human, also called Evolution".Chapter Three mainly discusses Yan Fu’s view of science and scientism. Yan Fu discussed some important propositions like what are science, function and value of science with his abundant scientific accomplishment and hot concern about development of science and technology. The contents of scientific view, which are certain in themes and clear in levels, have been formed. He pointed that science can be beneficial to achievements and successes while it forcing on external, to increase wisdom, mind-changing while it forcing on internal. These two functions are based on truth knowledge of science certainly. Yan Fu is the earliest Chinese to accept science as a system of value, thus he presents scientism tendency in some certain degrees and aspects. It appears in his thoughts of supremacy of science and tendency of scientism eminently. Meanwhile, he did not go to the extreme of "science is omnipotent". On the contrary, he realized that humanistic culture played an important role in one’s integrated development, so he put forward the suggestion that we cannot praise scientific culture highly and abandon humanistic culture absolutely.Chapter Four mainly discusses Yan Fu’s methodology and positivism. Yan Fu realized that the booming economy in western society profited from advanced science, and the advanced science cannot leave the guide of a scientific methodology, China must develop science if we’d like to shake off backwardness and catch up with world trend. For this reason, China has to introduce and learn the west scientific methodology radically. Setting the Britain’s empiricism, especially the inductive method of positivism as template of thinking and theory, he gradually formed a more complete scientific methodology with his own opinions, it is performed by two aspects intensively, which are principles of experience and logic. Yan Fu transferred his tendency of thinking from scientific inductive method to positivism. While accepting the scientific method of western positivism, he also received the phenomenalism principle of its epistemology. But compared with the opposite attitude of western positivism to metaphysics, based on the deep infection by Chinese traditional culture and realistic initiation duty of saving nation and making it strong, his attitude towards metaphysic was tolerant, especially on putting more concern on philosophical world view. Chapter Five mainly discusses Yan Fu’s view of the localization of the scientific culture. Yan Fu criticized systematically the misconception about the western scientific culture in modern times, such as the theories of "The Western Culture Originated from China" and "Chinese Essence and Western Means", which, to some extent, cleaned the idea obstacle and laid the ideological foundation for the practice of the localization of the scientific culture. Based on this, Yan Fu made further discussion on why the scientific culture had not been put forth in Chinese culture and put forward the view of the realizing the localization of scientific culture. He pointed out that the factors such as the suffocation of advocating truth and the restriction of academic research direction caused by the Chinese traditional education system, especially the civil service examination system, and by the feature of non-freedom in the traditional culture obstructs the naissance of the scientific culture. Therefore, he suggested the establishment of the independent academic evaluation system and the incentive system, which can push forward the localization of the scientific culture.Chapter Six discusses Yan Fu from the perspective of western learning spreading to the east. Yan Fu is an outstanding intellectual who made a significant contribution on western learning spreading to the east. The spreading of western learning is carried out as an important part of Enlightenment movement. For one century, the scholars have fully realized that the west learning spread by Yan Fu, to some extent, can be attributed to the theoretical system of philosophy of science. Generally speaking, philosophy of science is the philosophical reflection of science, it is the most exquisite and central part of scientific thoughts. Based on this, the paper deeply analyses Yan Fu’s intention and main contents on spreading the philosophy of science, and demonstrates Yan Fu’s specific status in detail in the history of philosophy of science spreading to the east. By discussing, the paper believes what Yan Fu spreads belongs to positivism philosophy of science, he prefers to choose this theory, because the theory, which emphasizes demonstration, cares logic and seeks effectiveness, plays an important ideological role in the reformation of traditional Chinese culture. By analyzing Yan Fu’s intention on spreading philosophy of science, the paper deepens the research on scientific thoughts from one side.The conclusion analyses the significance of Yan Fu’s thoughts on science in Chinese modern thought and academic circle. This paper describes that Yan Fu advocates scientific rational spirit, respects scientific methods, and attaches great importance to building an independent academic mechanism, all of these are equipped with modern science and thoughts, and open the history of modern Chinese science. In addition, this paper makes a brief introduction on further discussing Yan Fu’s scientific thoughts from the point of comparative literature.