Jin Yuelin
| Jin Yuelin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
14 July 1895 Changsha, Hunan |
| Died | 19 October 1984 (aged 89) Beijing, People's Republic of China |
| Fields | Logical philosophy |
| Institutions |
Tsinghua University National Southwestern Associated University Chinese Academy of Sciences Chinese Academy of Social Sciences |
| Influenced | H. Wang, Yin Haiguang |
Jin Yuelin (Chinese: 金岳霖) (1895–1984) was a Chinese philosopher best known for three works, one each on logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. He was also a commentator on Bertrand Russell.
Jin was born in Changsha, Hunan and attended Tsinghua University from 1911 until 1914. He obtained Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 1920. In 1926, Jin founded the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University. Jin was an active participant in the May 4th movement as a young, intellectual revolutionary. He helped to incorporate the scientific method into philosophy.Hao Wang was one of his students. He died in Beijing.
Among the first to introduce certain basics of modern logic into China, Jin also founded a new philosophical system combining elements from Western and Chinese philosophical traditions (especially the concept of Tao). Not much work on Jin’s philosophy has been done in the West in English, although a decent amount has been done in Chinese. Jin does not advocate a traditional, historical approach to philosophy, but rather presents philosophy as a practicing approach to solving problems – philosophy as goal in and of itself. This is quite different from how Chinese philosophers at the time viewed the study of philosophy. At the risk of oversimplifying, Jin’s approach can be viewed as a hybrid between Western and Eastern philosophical ideologies – influenced both by his Western education in logic and science, and by his Chinese roots. He was interested in Bertrand Russell’s work, and in particular with two main concepts: breaking down the complex into smaller parts, which was his understanding of Russell's logical atomism, and rebuilding through the logical method, which was Jin's reading of Russell's logicism. Both the logicism and the logical atomism affected Jin’s thinking and philosophy. However Jin can be considered a Chinese philosopher because he was most informed by Chinese philosophy, and concerned himself most with Chinese concepts, such as Tao. “However,” Zinda writes, “Jin used discursive structures borrowed from both Chinese and Western thought as modes of persuasion”.
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