Abstract

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Title:: Founding and Developing of the Discipline of History of Chinese Psychology: With a Review of Yang Xinhui’s Contributions

Keywords:: history of Chinese psychology; Marxism as guiding thought with three principles and multiple methods; category system; discipline system; study on thematic issues

Abstract:: Professor Yang Xinhui, one of the main founders of the discipline of history of Chinese psychology, has been engaged in the research on history of Chinese psychology since the late 1970s. He has made rich achievements in the field of the history of Chinese psychology and was granted the Achievement Award for disciplinary construction by the Chinese Psychological Society. He has developed a methodology for the research on history of Chinese psychology, known as “Marxism as guiding thought with three principles and multiple methods”. Specifically, the methodology advocates taking dialectical materialism and historical materialism as the fundamental guiding ideology. There are three principles of the methodology: the psychological essence as the main line, the concepts and systems of modern psychology as the reference, and the evaluation with scientific historicism. The methodology consists of multiple methods such as classified parallelism method, historical textual research method, demonstration-annotation hermeneutics, empirical testing, and system analysis. He has refined the category system of Chinese ancient psychological thoughts. In his view, human nature is the meta-category, and there are three sub-categories. He has constructed a variety of disciplinary systems of Chinese history of psychology. He has also made a wide range of research on thematic issues on history of Chinese psychology.