Hu Shi Quotes on Knowledge
Hu Shi (1891–1962), the principal Chinese pragmatist of the May Fourth generation and a student of John Dewey at Columbia, gave the New Culture Movement one of its most influential epistemological programmes. The Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (1919) and the long body of essays on literary and educational reform press the Deweyan case that genuine knowledge is the experimental working out of consequences in inquiry — "boldly hypothesize, carefully verify" — and the campaign for the vernacular (baihua) against the literary classical language is itself the linguistic correlate of a programme to make modern Chinese thought genuinely answerable to the conditions of empirical investigation rather than to inherited textual authority.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Hu Shi:
“Boldly hypothesize, carefully verify.”
-
Attributed to Hu Shi:
“We must not reject the old simply because it is old, nor accept the new simply because it is new.”
-
Attributed to Hu Shi:
“Education is the foundation of any genuine democracy.”
-
“The Chinese Renaissance , p. 50”
The original dispute was one of poetic diction... From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chinese literature. The question now became: In what language shall the New China produce its future literature? My answer was: The classical language, so long dead, can never be the medium of a living li -
“India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”
Hu Shih, The Indianization of China. Proceedings of Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences and Independence, Convergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought and Art. Harvard University Press, 1936. | The above is a widely known quote. However, some claim what Hu Shih said was "Rather than sending soldiers, India sent a few missionaries to conquer China culturally." [ 1 ] Others c -
“The above is a widely known quote. However, some claim what Hu Shih said was "Rather than sending soldiers, India sent a few missionaries to conquer China culturally." [ 1 ] Others claim that Hu Shih was not praising Indian culture at all and was in fact a reformist who viewed Indian philosophy negatively, blaming Indian introduced philosophy from monks like Xuanzang for destroying scientific empricism unlike earlier Chinese philosophers of the Warring States period. [ 2 ]”
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.