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Yang Chu (c. 395–335 B.C.)

Chinese philosopher who adopted positions of naive materialism and severely criticised religious views and the belief in immortality. According to him, all events and phenomena of nature and society are subject to the law of natural necessity, which he defined as fate. Hence, his views are not free from elements of fatalistic determinism. Yang Chu asserted that everything has to die or to be destroyed. Life, of natural necessity, gives way to death, destruction follows birth.

In ethics he laid much stress upon the individual with his desire for maximum satisfaction of his feelings and wishes. However, the hedonism and eudaemonism of Yang Chu were not carried to the extreme. He called on man to enjoy the present life and not to bother with the thought of what happens after death. His individualism was a reaction to the ethical and social gradation of men in Confucianism.

Yin and Yang

Basic concepts of ancient Chinese philosophy. Originally, they served to express lightness and darkness, hardness and softness, the male and female principles in nature. As Chinese philosophy developed, Yin and Yang increasingly symbolised the interaction of the extreme, diametrical opposites: light and darkness, day and night, sun and moon, heaven and earth, heat and cold, positive and negative, etc. Yin-yang acquired exceptionally abstract meaning in the speculative schemes of Neo-Confucianism, especially in the doctrine of Ri, the absolute law.

The concept of interaction of polar forces, regarded as the axis of the cosmic forces of motion and the prime cause of constant change in nature, forms the main content of most of the dialectical systems of Chinese philosophers. The doctrine of dualism of the yin-yang forces is an indispensable element of the dialectical constructions of Chinese philosophy. The yin-yang concepts have also found diverse applications in elaborating the theoretical principles of Chinese medicine, chemistry, music, etc.

Yoga

An orthodox idealist system of Indian philosophy. From the viewpoint of Yoga, the main purpose of all man's actions must be complete release from material existence, death and birth. The two main conditions for this release are vairagya (fearlessness, aloofness) and yoga (contemplation). The first stems from conviction of the futility of mundane life, which is full of evil and suffering. The second arises out of conviction of the need for knowing the highest truth—God.

In contrast to other systems of Indian philosophy, Yoga attaches exceptional importance to the perfection of the body and the sense-organs. The main principles of Yoga were formulated by Patanjali in the Yogasutras (c. 1st century B.C.).

Young Hegelians (or Left Hegelians)

Ideologists of the German liberalism in the 1830s–1840s, representatives of the radical wing of Hegel's philosophical school. In the conditions prevailing in Germany at that time their interpretation of Hegelian philosophy and their criticism of Christianity were but a specific form of bourgeois-democratic thought and political interest in general.

David F. Strauss' book, Das Leben Jesu (1835), which critically analysed the Gospel dogmas, promoted the formation of the Hegelian Left wing. Strauss considered Jesus as an ordinary historical personality, whose supernatural entity was due to a myth. The next step in the criticism of religion as a false form of consciousness was made by Bruno Bauer. He regarded the Gospel dogmas as deliberate inventions and the person of Jesus as fiction.

The theories of the Young Hegelians were but the first attempt, modelled on religion, to analyse social consciousness as a social structure (ideology). Their attention was centred on the question of how false concepts of society appear and acquire the force of compulsion. Strauss explained this by the traditional persistency of mythological views. Bauer saw the source of this phenomenon in the "alienation" of the products of individual "self-consciousness", in that the products of the human mind were considered as abstractions independent of it.

The critical analysis of the idealist doctrine of the Young Hegelians laid bare the limitedness of a purely immanent analysis of social consciousness and pointed to the necessity for investigating material social relations, for deducing from them the spiritual life of society. To a certain extent this necessity was grasped by Feuerbach. The task was fulfilled by Marx and Engels, who joined the Young Hegelians movement at the beginning of the 1840s. But they arrived at a radically new understanding of social development—the theory of historical materialism.

The bankruptcy of the Young Hegelians movement as bourgeois radicalism is seen most clearly in its underestimation of the role of the masses in history. This is clear from the works of Stirner, one of the forerunners of anarchism. The ideas of class struggle, of the objective laws of social development, and of the role of economic relations in the life of society were alien to the Young Hegelians. Their characteristic feature was revolutionary phraseology, containing only liberal threats to the ruling classes who were trying to arrest the bourgeois development of Germany. They regarded the masses as the "enemy of the spirit" and progress. According to them, the "critically thinking individual" was the motive force of history. Marx and Engels sharply criticised the ideas of the Young Hegelians in their works, The Holy Family and The German Ideology.

Yurkevich, Pamfil Danilovich (1827–1874)

Russian idealist philosopher and theologian, professor at the Kiev Theological Academy (since 1851) and Moscow University (since 1861). He became famous after the publication of his article "On the Science of the Human Spirit" (1860), in which he tried to refute the works of Chernyshevsky on the anthropological principle in philosophy and thus earned the praise and recognition of the reactionaries who opposed the materialism of the revolutionary democrats.

Yurkevich rejected the materialistic explanation of man's psychical life, counterposing to it the Christian notion of the unity of the body and the soul. Man, in his opinion, is cognised in two ways: the body is perceived by external senses, while spiritual phenomena are perceived by inner senses, by faith. Science should not interfere in the explanation of the spiritual life because it does not possess the means necessary for such cognition.

In his article, "Polemical Gems" (1861), Chernyshevsky showed that Yurkevich's religious idealism was untenable. The works of Sechenov, particularly his Reflexes of the Cerebrum (1863), laid the foundations for the scientific study of the psyche and refuted Yurkevich's religious views of the soul from the psychological point of view.

Yushkevich, Pavel Solomonovich (1873–1945)

Russian journalist, translator of philosophical literature, Social-Democrat and Menshevik, who retired from political activity in the 1920s. In the book Materialism i kritichesky realism (Materialism and Critical Realism), 1908, he criticised the philosophy of Marxism from the standpoint of Machism and subjective idealism. He preached empirio-symbolism.

His work Mirovozzreniye i mirovozzreniya (World Outlook and World Outlooks), 1912, attempted to justify idealistic myths by employing the specific character of philosophical creativity. According to him, philosophy is not a science but a result of semi-artistic, intellectually emotional vision, "a form of collective thought and sensation". This brings him close to James, Dilthey, Nietzsche. Lenin criticised Yushkevich's views in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.