The Twentieth-Century Chinese Philosophy and the Twenty-first-century Chinese Philosophy

The Chinese philosophy of the twentieth century was colorful, interflowing with western philosophy, re-presenting tradition and creative. However, from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century, how much has Chinese philosophy progressed as a philosophy to be understood and interpreted? Concluding the results of the last century, only the studies that approached the fundamental questions of philosophy facilitated the argumentation of Chinese philosophy, while other studies facilitated only the students' cognitive abilities. Here we propose a square framework made out of cosmology, ontology, the theory of self cultivation and the theory of perfection to summarize the methods to study the fundamental questions of philosophy. Unlike the western approach of philosophical models and the Chinese approach of conceptual categories, this is a philosophy-constructing method that can state the various schools of Chinese philosophy through a systematical framework of theories. However, the justification of the argumentation of Chinese philosophy itself is the next and more important issue in the development of theories. The varied schools of practical philosophy are nothing but inter-subjective doctrines, while objective argumentative deduction occurs only within the system. All the different schools are the theoretical and practical results of the self-recognition of values and the creation of practice, and these schools have no grounds to refute one another. As for the verification of the practitioner's practical results, only people who share the same faiths are sincere enough to verify, while the insincere other is unable to do that. Regarding the doctrine of verification, the texts of Records of Personages (Ren Wu Zhi) and Vegetable Root Discourse (Tsai Gen Tan) are quite profound, while the Buddhist zen stories (koan) are exactly the stories that corroborate the practitioner's practical results, and one can understand the wisdom of Chinese philosophical theories in measuring the practitioner's practical results. Chinese philosophy can be constructed philosophically only when the systematic framework of the theories about Chinese philosophy is constructed; the argumentative development of Chinese philosophy can be justified only when solid theories are proposed to verify the practical features of Chinese philosophy. As the view of truth about practical philosophy, in face of the debate between Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, this is a epistemological issue, an issue about the development of the epistemology of Chinese philosophy, as well as a recreation of the question-understanding of the twentieth century and the question-justification of the twenty-first century.