China & East Asia · 1891–1962
Hu Shi
May Fourth reformer who brought pragmatism to China
A student of John Dewey at Columbia, he preached “bold hypotheses, careful verification”, applied scientific method to the study of Chinese tradition, and championed writing in the vernacular.
Life and thought
Hu Shi was born in Shanghai in 1891 to a family from Jixi, Anhui. A Boxer Indemnity scholarship took him to Cornell and then Columbia, where he studied under John Dewey and finished his dissertation in 1917 (the degree came in 1927). At Peking University he called for literature in the vernacular and became a leading voice of the New Culture and May Fourth movements, interpreting for Dewey on his 1919–21 tour. He was later ambassador to the United States, president of Peking University and head of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, where he died in 1962.
He took from Dewey the view that ideas are tools for solving problems and must be tested by their consequences, and summed up method as “bold hypotheses, careful verification”. He urged “more study of problems, less talk of isms”, against grand ideological solutions. He turned critical method on China’s past: his Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy began with Laozi and Confucius, not legendary sage kings, and his 1926 discovery of Shenhui manuscripts from Dunhuang rewrote the history of Chan.