Feng YoulanFeng also spelled Fung, Wade-Giles romanization Fung Yu-lan Fung also spelled Feng, Pinyin Feng Youlan  ( born Dec. 4, 1895 , Honan Henan, China—died Nov. 26, 1990 , Peking  Beijing )  outstanding Chinese philosopher of the 20th century.

Fung Feng was educated at Peking (A.B., 1918) and Columbia (Ph.D., 1923) universities and in 1928 became professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University in PekingBeijing. His two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy (1934; rev. ed., 1952–53), which utilized Western historical methods, established his reputation and remains was the standard general history of Chinese philosophy until the late 20th century.

In 1939 Fung Feng set forth his own philosophical system in Hsin li-hsüeh Xinlixue (“New Rational Philosophy”), in which he converted certain 12th-century Neoneo-Confucian assertions about the world into formal logical concepts. These he dealt with in a systematic manner that was new to Chinese philosophy, which traditionally had largely used assertion and metaphor. In 1950, soon after the communist triumph in China, Fung Feng repudiated his own philosophy as idealistic, abstract, and devoid of historical and practical character, but from 1957 to 1963 he was severely attacked by Marxist-Leninist critics for continuing to advocate an idealistic philosophy. He nevertheless remained in China for the rest of his career.