Analyzing The Evolution Of Liang Qichao’s Scientific Opinion From Thoughts Of European Travelling

The development of the two stages of Liang Qichao’s scientific opinion is enormously significant to thought, which not only has deepened Chinese people’s knowledge about western ’Science’since modern times, but also his scientific opinion during late period to a great extent affect the developmental direction of China’s20th philosophy.This thesis puts Liang Qichao’s Thoughts of European Travelling as a basis, with high-level analysis of its structure and content to explore Liang’s scientific opinion, as well as the comparison of Liang’s two different scientific opinions in early and late times including main content, characteristics and scientific importance. Therefore, there are two developmental stages in the thesis—The Early period and The Late period. Liang’s Early Scientific Opinion period is from1890s to1920. In this period, Liang’s understanding towards western modern science is mutifaced, which includes shallow level such as skills and equipments and deep level such as knowledge and principles.But generally speaking, Liang’s early thoughts are limited within the frame of Chinese traditional ideas, mingled with western learning and Chinese learning. When Liang exiled Japan, he was influenced by the Japanese version Western learning. Liang’s scientific opinion has the color of scientism, which include the following aspects:to improve the scientific evolution theory and to uphold scientific method.Liang’s late scientific thoughts started during the period from the winter of1918to the spring of1920and became mature in the debating between science and metaphysics. During this period, Liang deeply rethought and criticized the scientism inclination of the earlier scientific opinions, such as the applied range of scientific method, the applied limit of the law of causation, the validity of scientific knowledge, and so on. Then he transferred from scientism to humanism by demarcating science and view of life, as well as science and philosophy.There are both breakage and succession between Liang’s two different scientific thoughts, the breakage side can be found from the differences of the main contents and specialties in the two different periods, while the succession side includes the entirety of the two thoughts, which has one unchangeable clue—the attention and discussion towards modern problems.