Abstract

Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao (廖文奎, 14. November 1905 – 1952) is a founding theorist of post-war Taiwan independence. We should see his pre-eminence as multifaceted, not merely because of his political engagement but because of his prolific intellectual achievement. He was a politician and activist who began the post-war overseas Taiwanese independence movement and shed light on its theoretical foundation. He was also an intellectual historian and political psychologist who applied and combined the philosophies of the Chicago pragmatist school, continental Lebensphilosophie, and Eastern Neo-Confucianism, along with Sun Yat-sen’s political doctrines, to contemporary East Asian intellectual discussions. He was one of the few Taiwanese who had proximity to Chinese Nationalist elites but chose to become an early advocate of Taiwanese independence Joshua’s complex character thus made him a figure of the post-war Taiwanese political history and a topic of East-Asian intellectual history that combined different traits of political and social thinking.