國立臺灣大學哲學論評

Abstract / PDF Download (Chinese)

This article attempts to elucidate the origin and formation of the “Chinese philosophy” or “Oriental philosophy” as an academic field which took form during the Meiji Era of Japan. The academic field called “Chinese philosophy” originated mainly from the incorporation of the discipline of philosophy into Tokyo University during the 1870s. The main scholars who contributed to the formation of this scholarly field were Ernest Fenollosa, Inoue Tetsujirō, and Shimada Chōrei. Fenollosa was the first teacher who taught the contents of Chinese thought from the viewpoint of philosophy. Inoue Tetsujirō was also the first instructor who took charge of the seminar under the title of “Oriental philosophy” in which he compared the “philosophical significance” of those early Chinese thinkers with those of their counterparts in the Western philosophical tradition. Shimada, succeeding Inoue, was another pioneer because he first taught the whole history of Chinese thought from the ancient to the Manchurian period, though Shimada himself had not received philosophy education in his youth. Their seminars have strengthened the philosophical image of traditional Chinese thinkers, and as a result, those thinkers have been all considered to be “philosophers” by the time of the early twentieth century. It was by this re-interpretation of the significance of traditional thought, especially from the perspective of ethics, that the contents of Confucian canonical studies of the Tokugawa period have been transformed into a new ideological ground for advocating the necessity of self-cultivation and so-called “national morality” in the following Taishō and Shōwa periods.