The Study Of Choi Hangi’s Epistemology

Choi Hangi is a Korean master of air philosophy in 19th century. His achievements in philosophy refered to natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. On the basis of scientific ideas of modern Western science,he developed the traditional concept of this subject, not only inherited the tradition of "air" meaning, but also given the "air" new meaning. On the basis of that,his own epistemological system was formed, with the explanation on the subject, process,criterion,inspect,purpose, relations between knowledge and action.Choi Hangi developed his arguments on the subject of action on the basis of air monism,which is the premise of the activities of human recognition. In particular,the ways of illustrating the universal features from air to number embodied view transition on "dongdaoxiqi"(combination of traditional oriental and western scientific epistemology) from a medieval world to the modern world. In the process of explanation, he denied forefather’s perception and thought the experience is the starting point of understanding,advocated the use of speculation organ to get experience and knowledge. In order to expand knowledge, access to further understanding, he advocated the use of speculation organ to get experience and knowledge.In order to expand the scope and deepen the understanding,he claimed to use the assumption,that is,to enlarge and deepen the scope of knowledge. Meanwhile, assumption from direct knowledge to indirect knowledge and experience and a different mode of thinking is hard to avoid deformation and the possibility of erroneous,so he advocated the process of acquiring knowledge from other people’s experience and repeated trials in order to obtain true knowledge of this process. When we repeated the process "feel the experience-assumption-trials" again and again, it will reach the highest state of awareness-"ti ren"(highest state of epistemology).Then we established "standard’ of doing things. Referring to it, we can made the results come to the reality.Of course, the process did not faithfully reflect on knowledge of external things, but to guide practice further, and to understand the ultimate goal-building unified society of great harmony.This paper attempts to use Marxist theory of knowledge as the domain system to describe the Choi Hangi epistemology, finding that his epistemology and today’s scientific understanding of the methods are similar, with the dialectical characteristics: sensory experience is similar to the "observation"; "assumption "from the sense is the similar to the" hypothesis ";" assumption "through the trials become "popular truth ",which is the same to the law is established through the inspection certificate.Choi Hangi scientific epistemology is also reflected in the "practice-knowledge" approach, that is, scientific theories or laws should be repeated test in the history of experience, so they can be constantly updated or revised.Choi Hangi’s theory of knowledge is in the traditional Confucian framework, with the absorption of Western natural science knowledge,which was introduced after the formation of North Korea. His theory of knowledge is a combination of a traditional Oriental and Western scientific epistemology, resulting that the Korean epistemology of pragmatic thinking to a new height.