Cao Hai De's "Common Sense Philosophy" and the development of philosophical terminology in the early 20th century (1900-1920)

Abstract

The development of new fields of knowledge imported from the West to Vietnam began in the early twentieth century. To accept and acquire this new body of knowledge, both local intellectuals and foreigners fluent in various languages, including Vietnamese, have attempted to apply and produce Vietnamese in the best possible way, particularly regarding some modern scientific notions. Most of this lexicon acted as a term. The field of philosophy was also born in this context. The terminological system communicating philosophical notions, as one of the primary criteria for constructing a discipline, made a significant contribution to the establishment and evolution of the discipline during and beyond this period. From a textual perspective, using a linguistic history approach paired with the methods: statistics, analysis, and comparison, we conducted the study on the philosophical terminology in Cao Hai De's work “Common Sen Philosophy”, published in 1917, and compared to Co Chinh Linh's Philosophy of Magic and Wisdom (Albertus Schlicklin) - a French priest - to uncover similarities and differences in scientific thinking and subject-object language. The survey results of these two publications reveal that in addition to contributing to creating the milestone of the birth of philosophy, the documents show the way of philosophical terminology system building and developing and also demonstrate the acumen, extreme integration, and efforts to promote societal advancement of Vietnamese intellectuals at that time, among whom Cao Hai De was a phenomenon.