China and the West

Hu Shi promoviert am Department of Philosophy der Columbia University unter John Dewey und Friedrich Hirth.
Hu selected two of Dewey's classes : social and political philosophy and schools of ethics. Three aspects of Dewey's teaching had a lasting impact on Hu, and were explicated in much of Hu's own writings : 1) Dewey's theory, which divided thinking into four evolutionary stages : the initial stage when beliefs were held fixed and static ; the Sophist stage where the certainty and static consistency of the previous stage was challenged ; the Socratic stage which transformed discussion into reasoning and subjective reflection into a method of proof ; and the inductive and empirical stage where thinking became research by way of the logical method. 2) Dewey's secular and instrumental approach to the study of the history of philosophy. 3) Dewey's idea of contextualism.