Yan Fu Western Positivist Thinking Lessons And Innovations

In the recent history, Yan fu is not only a famous thinker, but also is a special master of translation. When people talk about the scholars that introduced western asset class philosophy to China, they would think about yan fu. The late19c and the early20c is the important period of China that western scientific thought enter into China, this period even influence the process of modern Chinese thought culture. Positivism is introduced into China by yan fu in this process. As a student that first went to European, he widely accepted the thought of positivism thinkers of Spencer and Mill, and he introduced the positivism to China as the representative of the western culture. He absorbed Spencer's social Darwinian Theory that "the survival of the fittest" to wake up people's sleeping mind; he introduced Mill's logic to regulate people's thinking method. The positivism that yan fu introduced had a significant impact at the time of China and developed into a trend gradually. But the time of Wu Hsu Reform, yan fu advocated reform and protected from extinction; promoted the study of western learning and abolished traditional study. But when the movement was failed, he opposited revolution and advocated reform, besides, he believed agnosticism. The different change before and after the movement was not only restricted by the historical conditions and traditional philosophy, but also was influenced by his positivism thought. This paper tries to comb and research yan fu's innovation about positivism systematically.The introduction of this paper mainly introduces the topic selection, the reasons of the significance in both at home and abroad. The first part of this paper is to analysis the characteristics, the spread of background and the represents of positivism to clarify this theory's thought core in order to lead to the reason that yan fu absorbed positivism. The second part makes a system elaboration about Spencer and Mill, which were representatives of positivism; they were the thinkers that made great influence on yan fu. In this part, the author revealed their positivism connotations in order to understand the positivism yan fu absorbed conveniently. The third part is the key part that writing yan fu's absorption and development of positivism. In this chapter, the author combs thought that yan fu absorbed from Spencer and Mill and digs out the development that yan fu to positivism in order to refine the influence that positivism to yan fu. The fourth part discusses the criticism that yan fu made to positivism, and the impact that yan fu's positivism thought. The last part is an overview of the full text and expounds the main idea of this paper.