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A brief history of analytic philosophy in Hong Kong

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Abstract

This paper offers a brief historical survey of the development of analytic philosophy in Hong Kong from 1911 to the present day. At first, Western philosophy was a minor subject taught mainly by part-time staff. After the Second World War, research and teaching in analytic philosophy in Hong Kong began to grow and consolidate with the expansion of higher-education and the establishment of new universities. Analytic philosophy has been a significant influence on comparative and Chinese philosophy and played a crucial role in the teaching and promotion of critical thinking. Analytic philosophers in Hong Kong are now active participants in the global philosophical community. We review the development of analytic philosophy across the major tertiary institutions in Hong Kong and discuss some of the future challenges faced by the discipline.

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Notes

  1. Source: Information Services Department (2020); Singapore Department of Statistics (2022).

  2. We shall not be discussing the development of analytic philosophy in Mainland China and Taiwan. Readers interested in the history can consult Cheng & Bunnin (2002), Jiang & Bai (2010), Littlejohn & Li (2019), Rošker (2022), and Hung (2022).

  3. Mellor (1980, p60).

  4. However, the citation in the 1925 calendar was “Dr. H. E. Moore : Ethics (Home University).” Presumably this was a typo.

  5. Russell (1920, October 11). It is unclear if Russell disembarked, and there is no record of him interacting with academics in Hong Kong.

  6. See Paisley (2020) for a detailed account of Russell’s China visit.

  7. Reeve was born in England and had served as headmaster at a secondary school in Hong Kong. Famous author Eileen Chang (張愛玲) was an undergraduate student at HKU and took a course in logic with Reeve in her first year (1939–1940). See Cunich (2022) for more details and for further information about the teaching of logic and philosophy at HKU in the pre-war period.

  8. Rand’s anthology The Classical Moralists was one of the course texts, and the recommended readings included Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics and History of Ethics.

  9. There were also two part-time lecturers, including Erik Kvan from Denmark who taught psychology. He eventually became a full-time senior lecturer, Head of the Psychology Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law.

  10. Lau graduated from the HKU Chinese Department and obtained an MA in philosophy from Glasgow in 1949. At Glasgow, he was the first international student to have won the Buchanan Prize for Logic. Lau was known as “Library LAU” at SOAS, and he was promoted to Reader in Chinese Philosophy in 1967 (Baker, 2010).

  11. See Agassi (2008) for details about his time in Hong Kong. Margaret Ng is a well-known barrister, author, and politician in Hong Kong. She obtained her BA and MA from HKU and submitted her MA thesis on the philosophy of science in 1975, supervised by T. C. Goodrich. She subsequently went to Boston to study under Agassi.

  12. See his short autobiography in Hung (2019).

  13. See Liu & Goldstein (1998).

  14. Lau Hak-wan (劉克頑), who graduated from the programme in 2001, is a cognitive neuroscientist working on consciousness, perception, and metacognition, with many publications co-authored with philosophers.

  15. Xu was recommended by the renowned scholar Hu Shi (胡適), who studied with John Dewey. Hu visited HKU in 1935 to receive his honorary doctorate.

  16. Li (1977, p15). Li was the first Vice-Chancellor of CUHK.

  17. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Vice-Chancellor (1969, p6). This report contains detailed information about the background and early organisation of CUHK.

  18. See Chou (2012) for an account of the early history of New Asia College.

  19. For more discussion on New Confucianism, see Makeham (2003), Chou (2012), and Yu (1996), especially Ch.5. In 1958, Tang, Mou, Xu, and Zhang Junmai (張君勱) published a joint essay “A Manifesto to the World’s People on Behalf of Chinese Culture.” This famous essay defended a conception of Chinese culture based centrally on Confucianism. It offered a vision of how Chinese culture might accommodate democracy and science, and how it might contribute to the contemporary world.

  20. See Chung Chi College (2021, pp. 7-10). The Department was renamed as “Department of Philosophy and Religious Knowledge” in 1968.

  21. Lao’s grandfather was a high-ranking Qing dynasty official who helped negotiate Britain’s lease of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories after China’s defeat in the Second Opium War.

  22. For example, Tang (1946)

  23. There were of course exceptions. For example, Robert Allison, an American, was a member of the Department and published several philosophical works in English.

  24. See Chapters 1 and 2 in Wu & Cheung (2018) and the section on “History and Development” in the LU website (https://www.ln.edu.hk/history-and-development).

  25. See, for example, the discussion of the scholar tradition in Yu (1987).

  26. For example, the Brew Note Salon is a seminar series held in a café, on themes related to philosophy as well as Hong Kong culture and politics. It started in 2017 and is organized by Chow Po Chung from CUHK. Chow also led a reading group from 2002 to 2017, and many attendees have become Hong Kong academics working on moral and political philosophy.

  27. The public broadcast radio station RTHK ran a series of Chinese programmes on critical thinking and philosophy in the 1980s, hosted by Lee Tien-ming, Sin King-kui, and many others. “Big Idea,” an English radio programme from 2011 to 2016 also on RTHK, featured a number of philosophers and academics from HKU.

  28. An example is the online course Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought available on the edX platform, with HKU’s Chad Hansen as instructor.

  29. University Grants Committee (n.d.). The 2020 assessment for philosophy included only eligible staff from HKU, CUHK, and LU.

  30. 73.7% in 2014/15, down to 70.6% in 2020/21. Source: The Hong Kong University Grants Committee website at https://www.ugc.edu.hk.

  31. See, for example, Sesardic & de Clercq (2014), written by two Hong Kong philosophers at LU, criticizing some of the evidence given in support of the discrimination hypothesis.

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Acknowledgements

Joe Lau would like to express his gratitude to Peter Cunich for generously sharing his notes and observations about the early history of HKU and the HKU Philosophy Department. He would also like to thank the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin for access to the Morrell collection. Special thanks to Garfield Lam and his colleagues at the HKU University Archives for assisting with access to university records. Jonathan Chan would like to thank Lo Kit-hung for information related to LU’s philosophy teaching and research from the 1990s to 2000s.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    Joe Y. F. Lau

  2. Retired faculty of Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Jonathan K. L. Chan

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  1. Joe Y. F. Lau
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Correspondence to Joe Y. F. Lau.

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Lau, J.Y.F., Chan, J.K.L. A brief history of analytic philosophy in Hong Kong. AJPH 1, 27 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00031-5

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