On Yan Fu's Empirical Theory

Modern Chinese society was impoverished and weak,and the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War in the First Sino-Japanese War aroused the will of the people to save and survive.At this time,Western philosophy was introduced in large quantities and intellectuals began to awaken.Yan Fu,as the first person to introduce Western studies to China,reflected on traditional Chinese philosophy while spreading Western studies.Translating Western works and influenced by the empirical ideas of Bacon,Locke,Berkeley and Mill,Yan Fu began to recast traditional Chinese philosophy and had a great impact on the transformation of traditional Chinese philosophy.Yan Fu overturned the "ancient book into training" on the source of cognition,emphasized experience as the source of cognition,divided cognition into "meta-knowledge" and "inferred knowledge",and overturned the a priori "conscience theory" in traditional Chinese philosophy.It overturned the traditional Chinese philosophy of "conscience" and freed people from the shackles of morality.In terms of the test of knowledge,he emphasized the role of experiment and practice,proposed the idea of "investigate things to real test",criticized the traditional Chinese philosophy's focus on "second-hand knowledge",and cultivated people's scientific awareness of practice.In the area of testing cognition,Yan proposed "internal preliminaries" and "external preliminaries",recognizing the weakness of traditional Chinese philosophy in logic.However,Yan Fu overemphasized the role of sensory experience and inductive method,and believed that man could not know the essence of things,and eventually fell into agnosticism.Yan Fu's empiricist ideas bridge the East and the West,injecting Western empiricist philosophy into traditional Chinese philosophy,raising people's philosophical concepts and philosophical awareness,and promoting the transformation of modern Chinese philosophy,while his empiricist ideas also influenced his political philosophical thinking.