Fu Xuan's Biography

Author: Wei Ming'an
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-03-01
Features: This book conducts an in-depth and meticulous examination of the family background, life, and works of Fu Xuan, a thinker and litterateur during the Wei-Jin period. It provides a serious analysis of his ideological profile and literary achievements, arriving at novel conclusions about understanding the person and the era. As a thinker, Fu Xuan was a political commentator and ethicist, not a philosopher. His representative work, Fu Zi: Inner Chapters, discusses the "techniques of governing the people," serving the realistic political situation of the Sima clan replacing the Wei dynasty, and belongs to the category of "miscellaneous works." As a litterateur, Fu Xuan's main achievements were achieved during the Wei period, and he was not one of the Taikang writers of the Western Jin dynasty. The opinions on Xuanxue (Neo-Daoism) and other academic insights in Fu Zi are also worth attention. This book also provides a specific analysis and explanation of the phenomenon where a large amount of Fu Zi text is mixed into Yang Quan's Theory of Things, distinguishing and identifying them. Yang Quan was an astronomer and philosopher with ideas distinct from Fu Xuan. Based on the existing scattered materials, this book reconstructs Yang Quan's life and argues for his ideology, presenting novel insights.