Historian of Philosophy LILITH LEE (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) reflects on the value of reconstructing Straits Chinese philosophy for the history of world philosophies and for Singaporean self-understanding.  

Many of us in Singapore today would find it surprising that we might have any philosophers to call our own at all — much less see ourselves as having set any example of philosophical practice for the world. Yet, why is this? After all, each of us wrestles with philosophical questions concerning the meaning of suffering and death, as well as what lies beyond them — for which such answers have to also take into account the others we live alongside, as well as their answers.

The variety of such questions and answers were not lost on the first president of the Straits Philosophical Society, Sir Charles Warren, who remarked in the Society’s 1893 inaugural address the following:

“After so many generations in particular countries and callings, no doubt the minds of people will get inclined to develop special faculties, and probably the Tamils, Malays, and Chinese have totally different powers of observation developed. […]

“It is an extraordinary fact that we are here living in the midst of so many nations, and yet that very few of us over take the slightest trouble to study their habits or customs. […] it would be the case of Singapore setting the example of doing what will certainly have to be undertaken at home [in Britain] in a few years.”¹

The Straits Philosophical Society would go on to hold its monthly meetings for another three decades (even through the First World War), during which members engaged in “the critical discussion of questions in Philosophy, History, Theology, Literature, Science, and Art.”² Members had to be resident in Singapore, but the society had corresponding members and readers elsewhere in the Straits Settlements (e.g. Penang) and the broader British Empire.

Consisting mainly of colonial elites, resident members largely saw themselves as in, but not of, Singapore. There were, however, two exceptions of particular note: the Straits Chinese philosophers Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957) and Tan Teck Soon (1859–1922), who also happened to be the only ‘Asiatic’ resident members.³

Lim (the same Boon Keng after whom a major road and MRT station in Singapore is named) is well-remembered among Peranakan and Chinese communities today (thanks in large part to the continuing efforts of his great-grandaughter, the writer and playwright Stella Kon). However, he remains little known for his role as two-term president of the Straits Philosophical Society or the intricacies of his philosophical innovations. As for Tan, a contributor for the Malaya Tribune in 1929 would also be disappointed to learn of his absence in the annals of Straits Chinese community, having described him as “a writer, philosopher and essayist of no mean merit” and “a beacon-light to those of the present generation and the generation yet unborn of the local [Straits] Chinese community.”⁴

Within the past year, local academic philosophers (such as myself) have begun reflecting on the history of philosophical practices in Singapore, with special attention to the philosophies of Lim and Tan. Recovering the ideas and arguments of the Straits Chinese philosophers in the early days of the British colony is not only foundational to this, but also contributes to the broader global movement in history of philosophy departments to diversify and decolonise the discipline away from a more traditionally Eurocentric canon. Importantly, attending to Straits Chinese philosophy at the turn of the 20^th century is less about crude ‘East’ vs ‘West’ categories or national pride, but more about us learning from the robust and complex intellectual agencies and motivations of those who have gone before us at the shifting crossroads and peripheries of world empires.

In this brief essay, I merely wish to offer readers a small glimpse of the philosophical richness and sophistication of Lim and Tan as they sought to articulate and argue for their places and outlooks in the world — as well as hint at what more is to be done, if one were to attempt tracing the implications of Straits Chinese philosophy for the broader history of philosophy of Singapore and our intellectual practices today.⁵ The hope is that the sketches presented here would suffice for spurring interest in the recent publications on them (mentioned below) — and, in turn, that these would be generative for academics of other fields and projects to find resonances within their own work.

A Straits Philosophical Society dinner. Tan Teck Soon is on the extreme left. Lim Boon Keng is second in the row facing away from the camera (with his hand on the napkin).

The Ideas of Lim and Tan

As an academic historian of philosophy, my attention here is focused largely on Lim and Tan’s own conceptual apparatuses and argumentation at the time. Much like other philosophers theorising at the decline of the Qing imperium and height of the British one, these philosophers were preoccupied with ideas concerning what it means to be a human being with a culture, a religion, or a language — as well as the approaches and methods by which such questions ought to be answered. However, sustained attention to the specific philosophical practices in the Straits Settlements is generally lacking in the disciplines of Chinese philosophy, Southeast Asian philosophy, and even less in Anglo-European philosophy. This is so even as academic philosophy continues developing its longstanding interest in ‘comparative,’ ‘inter-cultural,’ ‘borderless,’ ‘fusion,’ ‘hybrid,’ or ‘world’ philosophies: for example, the history of philosophy of Singapore only debuted at the 25^th World Congress of Philosophy in Rome last year.

Much of this is due not only to how recently Straits Chinese philosophy is only just being recognised as a research area and the comparative lack of readily available sources, but also to the specific expertises required to recognise and appreciate the complex syncretisms of such philosophers at the overlap of Mainland and Maritime Southeast Asia under British rule. Lim and Tan each articulated their own unique cosmopolitan syntheses of the philosophies they encountered in and around Singaporean society., Lim combined Confucianism with contemporaneous evolutionary science and Scottish medicine, while Tan combined Daoism and German Idealism, in close dialogue with (Sri Lankan) Buddhism.

Given the growth of the varieties of religion in the British colonies then, the philosophy of religion was a particular point of interest for these men. For example, Lim (writing as ‘Wen Ching’) argued in the Straits Chinese Magazine against the existence of a self-existent, immaterial, and insensible soul. One of the arguments advanced by Lim in this 1900 article is as follows (reconstructed in argument form here for clarity):

Argument from the Explanatory Redundancy of the Soul

1. The soul cannot be cognised through one’s senses.
2. If X can be explained without any appeal to Y, Y is explanatorily redundant for understanding X.
3. If the soul exists, it is not explanatorily redundant for understanding human functions.
4. Cognitions of the human being through one’s senses are sufficient for explaining human functions.
5. Human functions can be explained without any appeal to the soul.
6. Therefore, the soul is explanatorily redundant for understanding human functions.
7. Therefore, the soul does not exist. 

Lim here is implicitly developing an argument from premises found in Charles Darwin’s (1871) Descent of Man, in which human functions (e.g. reason, self-consciousness, sense of beauty, morality) are explained without any explicit mention of the soul. As we learn from Lim’s (1910) essay “Darwinism and Religion” to the Straits Philosophical Society, his above argument would be deployed particularly in service of demonstrating that the metaphysical materialism of Confucianism (which according to him relies “mainly upon reason and experience”), was more consistent with “the advances of science” and “the searchlight of Darwinism” than “the dogmas of most revealed religions”—such as the metaphysical dualism (of body and soul) of Christianity (38). 

Being trained in medicine at both The Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge (1887–1893), Lim would have been directly acquainted with the burgeoning developments in evolutionary science at the time — unlike many other Sinophone philosophers of the late-Qing era who would have encountered with Darwinism largely through Yan Fu’s (1898) Spencerian translation of Thomas Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics.”

In a 1912 criticism of an essay, “Sin and Suffering” (by H.C.E Zacharias), for the Straits Philosophical Society, Tan similarly affirms the incompatibility of metaphysical dualism with science (which his essayist otherwise held as compatible). However, while he rejects metaphysical dualism, Tan is also less confident about the ability of science to resolve philosophical problems than Lim:

“The task of science is to render thoughts (that is, the representation of things) concise and exact, but all our thinking is done by concentrating our attention upon a definite point. This explains the source of many perplexing pseudo-problems which lie in the method of science itself. If we wish to see some special object we look at it and our eyes converge upon it. Thus one thing is singled out, while the rest of the world is set aside. If we think of a thing, we establish lines of demarcation and exclude all such qualities and relations as do not belong to the idea under consideration, however important they may be otherwise, even for the thing and its existence. These lines of demarcation do not exist in nature, they are the artifice by which we are enabled to grasp the thing. Nature is an immeasurable and inseparably inter-connected whole, and so all our mental discriminations and boundaries are almost as artificial as the lines traced on a map. The method by which our minds creates artificial units is indispensable, for otherwise we could not bring order into our world of thought, but if we forget what belongs to our method and what to objective reality, we are apt to take our formulas to be the real things.” (173–174)

This echoes lines from Ch. 2, Qiwulun ‘Identity of Contraries’, of the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi (c. 4^th century BCE), whose eponymous author (of traditional attribution) was one of Tan’s most-celebrated philosophers. For example, we see the following passage from a contemporaneous Herbert A. Giles’ 1889 translation (although Tan worked with the text in Classical Chinese):

Therefore it is that, viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into One.

Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of all things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, subjectively; but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed. And viewing them thus they are able to comprehend them, nay, to master them;—and he who can master them is near. So it is that to place oneself in subjective relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,—this is Tao. But to wear out one’s intellect in an obstinate adherence to the individuality of things, not recognising the fact that all things are One […]

Tan compares this Daoist position to Kant’s transcendental idealism, continuing his 1912 criticism by articulating a similar crucial point of clarification on Kant for his audience in the Straits Philosophical Society (a mistaken conflation that many still perform today):

Kant’s idea that “all knowledge is restricted to the object of possible experience, which is (a) of the phenomenal and (b) of the noumenal world,” does not mean that the phenomenal and noumenal exist independently apart, or originate separately in a dualistic sense in our experience, but that both are based in our ‘empirical,’ or those judgments that contain sensory elements. Kant likewise distinguished between ‘transcendental’ and ‘transcendent.’ ‘Transcendental’ denotes the subjective conditions of all experience, consisting in the recognition of the à priori, such such truisms as logical, arithmetical, and geometrical theorems, which are the clearest, most indisputable, and most unequivocal notions we have […] ‘Transcendent,’ however, means that which lies beyond the ken of all possible knowledge, the nebulous domain in which we can affirm as well as deny the possibility of assumptions […] If we want to know the truth, we must learn to distinguish between the objective fact and our interpretation of it.

The revolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin would have had a profound influence on Lim Boon Keng and Tan Teck Soon.

Despite Tan and Lim’s clear methodological opposition to each other, we can presently only speculate on the contents of their philosophical conversations with each other — even though they were also reported to have collaborated frequently (e.g. as the opposition in the Debating Society of the Straits Chinese Church). It is a matter of misfortune that philosophical practice is not always recorded in accordance with the expectations of posterity, if at all. The extent historical records we have on the philosophical practices of Tan and Lim are largely found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Straits Philosophical Society (scattered in libraries across the globe), as well as the Straits Chinese Magazine (which often republished their essays from the Straits Philosophical Society).

But, in any case, it is clear that Tan and Lim’s hybrid systems of Daoist-Idealism and Confucian-Darwinism, respectively, defy any simplistic attempts to classify their philosophical affinities as either ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’ per se.

Browsing the ‘Philosophy’ shelves of Ngee Ann City’s Books Kinokuniya over the past summer, I am heartened to find historians Lim Teck Ghee & Charles Brophy’s 2023 anthology of selected discussions from the Straits Philosophical Society. It is a welcome retrospective more than a century after H.N. Ridley, president of the society from 1907 to 1912, undertook to publish select proceedings from the society.⁶ Unlike Ridley’s selections, Lim & Brophy’s critical anthology offers a post-independence reflection on the socio-political significance of the Society for the colonial administration of the Straits Settlements (including territories beyond Singapore, e.g. Penang and Malacca)—occasionally reflecting on the places of Tan and Lim in the Society.

Prior to the efforts of Lim and Brophy, however, only a handful of other historians, literary theorists, and political scientists have thus far also sought to pay sustained attention to the intellectual practices of Tan and Lim (with much less attention to the former).⁷ Characterisation of Tan and Lim’s efforts, however, remain circumscribed within broader, regional or (counter-)imperial trends—in spite of both philosophers’ more universal ambitions for their thought.

Alongside these, over the past half a year, there has been continuing impetus to attend to the intellectual practices of Tan and Lim, though reconstructed now as philosophy, seen in three recent Open Access publications in leading peer-reviewed journals of philosophy: concerning Tan’s answer to the problem of evil; Lim’s critique of Eurocentric philosophy; and how their philosophical practices transcended the limits of the Straits Philosophical Society. That is, Tan and Lim are finally being seen again as engaged in sophisticated projects that systematically articulate timeless and universal ideas in their own right — not merely as ad hoc reactions to their positions between King and Qing in the Malay Archipelago.

History of Philosophy in Singapore

The term ‘history of philosophy’ often reflexively conjures up in many minds thinkers and texts like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Descartes’ Meditations, Kant’s Critiques. However profound we might recognise the insights of these philosophers to be, if philosophy is meant to be a discipline of ideas purporting timelessness and universality, it is puzzling that their history should be so uniquely indexed to the development of ‘the West.’⁸ The historiographer of philosophy Peter K.J. Park reminds us that this is no accident: the dominance of Euro-American philosophers in our imagination is due to “an exclusionary, Eurocentric canon of philosophy” that formed within German philosophy in the early nineteenth century.

Perhaps with greater inertia than many other disciplines, academic philosophy sees itself today on the long road away from this tendency. Traditional strongholds of the exclusionary, Eurocentric canon of philosophy have begun to undertake the long-overdue work to diversify and decolonise research and teaching content and practices—following in the footsteps of (less illustrious and well-funded) institutions before them.⁹

A less provincial approach to the history of world philosophies attends not only to narratives of grand civilisations with corresponding ‘ready-made’ thinkers and texts,¹⁰ but more crucially to the vast and deep networks of the philosophical practices found all across the global distribution of human communities—whether these are accorded ‘grand civilisational’ status or not (e.g., Chinese or Maori philosophies).

The recent path-breaking attempt to start recognising Straits Chinese philosophy as philosophy cannot be a corrective to the Eurocentric canon on its own. It is, however, as crucial a contribution as any such reconstructions in the global efforts to provide a more accurate and comprehensive record of the history of world philosophies.

Still, what is at stake in embarking on this history of philosophy in Singapore is not yet another seat at the game of national or cultural chauvinism, but greater self-clarification of our inherited struggles and wishes as a cosmopolitan nation. What further implications such a line of research might have for understanding Singaporean intellectual practices in the here-and-now will require a lot more nuanced and careful work to map out the philosophical terrain of its early history, as well as to trace these first philosophers’ ideas (and transformations thereof) through the decades after WWII, the struggles for decolonisation and independence, industrialisation and commercialisation, undulating US-China relations, up to the nascent ‘multi-polar’ order today. Doing so would not only amount to a genealogy of our present moral and metaphysical commitments, which would clarify the conceptual stakes of more recent ideological disputes (e.g. discourses concerning ‘Asian Values’ or ‘identity politics’). It would also locate us within a transhistorical imaginary of local contestations and community-building against ideologies of global dominance. After all, despite the century between us and the Straits Chinese philosophers, their perennial questions of the meaning of our lives and livelihoods, as well as their negotiations with imperial modes of racialisation, gender roles, and economic asymmetries continue to resonate — if not linger on — in our present age.

Recovering a history of philosophy in Singapore would need to attend to everyday experiences of peoples of the street.

Such work will have to also attend to the contemporaneous efforts of the non-Sinophone intelligentsia in the Straits Settlements (e.g. reformists of the periodical Al-Imam, 1906–1908), historical interactions between intelligentsia of different language groups, challenges to seeing intelligentsia as exclusively the domain of men (e.g. Ruth Hwang’s ‘Confucian-feminist’ novels), relations between such intellectuals and everyday experiences of the peoples of the street (e.g. rickshaw drivers or sex workers), as well as interconnected developments throughout Southeast Asia (e.g. Confucian-decolonial movements in Vietnam) and beyond (e.g. Lim and Rabindranath Tagore’s thoughts on pan-Asianism). All of these find their way into the ideological kaleidoscope that we have inherited in Singapore today.

This would far outstrip the intellectual province and capacities of any historian of philosophy, who (being in academic philosophy) is often more concerned with close-reading and conceptual analysis within a limited historical context. Furthering the history of philosophy in Singapore in a more general way that has significance for the nation — beyond the ivory tower — will require not only increasing collaborative work across the fields of history, philosophy, literature, sociology and more, but also sustained dialogue between academics, archivists, and audiences in the coming years.

– LILITH LEE is a historian of philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is currently co-authoring a monograph, with Ady Van den Stock, on the philosophy of Lim Boon Keng tentatively titled Medical Confucianism: The Straits Chinese Philosophy and Politics of Lim Boon Keng (Edinburgh University Press).

Further Reading

Ben Blumson, Loy Hui Chieh, & Michael Pelczar, “Philosophy in Singapore until 1980,” Journal of Asian Philosophy 4:132 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-025-00339-y.

Lilith Lee, “Navigating the Straits between Science and Spirit,” MUSE SG Magazine, published 7 July 2025, National Heritage Board, Singapore. https://www.roots.gov.sg/MUSE/articles/Navigating-the-Straits-between-Science-and-Spirit

Lim Teck Ghee & Charles Brophy, eds., The Straits Philosophical Society and Colonial Elites in Malaya: Selected Paper on Race, Identity, and Social Order (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2023). https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/7833

Lee Wilson and Natalie Alana Ashton, “Receptive Publics in Colonial Contexts: The Case of the Straits Philosophical Society,” Topoi 44:3 (2025): 719–732. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-025-10203-6

Lee Wilson, “The Cycles of Heaven and History: Some Notes on Approaching Historical Immortality and the Project of Reconciliation from a Look at Nineteenth Century Straits Chinese Philosophy,” The Journal of the Philosophy of History 19:2 (2025): 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341557

———, “Eurocentrism as disease: a pathology between King and Qing” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2025): 1–24. [Online First] https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2025.2558188

Notes

1. Charles Warren, “Introductory Address: On the Subject of Boundaries and Limits,” Transactions of the Straits Philosophical Society 1 (1894): 10. ↩︎
2. Rules of the Straits Philosophical Society (Singapore: Straits Times Press, Ltd, 1910), 1. ↩︎
3. There were, of course, other Sinophone philosophical practitioners who were not members (e.g., Khoo Seok Wan, Gu Hongming), whose works similarly warrant greater attention. ↩︎
4. “Philosopher and Essayist,” Malaya Tribune, May 4, 1929. ↩︎
5. Lim and Tan were not the only Straits Chinese philosophers: Gu Hongming, for example, was another Straits Chinese philosopher (from Penang), who was also internationally renowned at the time.  ↩︎
6. H.N. Ridley, ed. Noctes Orientales: Being a Selection of Essays Read before the Straits Philosophical Society between the years 1893 and 1910. (Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, Ltd, 1913). ↩︎
7. Of these, Philip Holden’s attention to the literary practices surrounding related publications in Straits Chinese Magazine (1897–1907, 1930) are particularly noteworthy. ↩︎
8. That is, irrespective of the shifting referents of this notion over the centuries: Kant, for example, lived in what is now modern-day Russia. ↩︎
9. n April 2024, the University of Oxford welcomed its first Professor of Indian Philosophy, Monima Chadha—a hundred and forty-five years after Max Müller published his first translations of the Upanishads with the university’s press in the field of philology. And this past summer, the publication of The University of Edinburgh’s race review led by Tommy Curry and Nicola Firth, “brought to light important, confronting and often uncomfortable accounts of [its] historical ties to slavery and colonialism, the legacy of racist teachings and ideologies, and current challenges we face around race and inclusion.” Among other findings, the review uncovered that Edinburgh alumnus and second Resident of Singapore, John Crawfurd, very much inherited the racial prejudices of Edinburgh’s then-premier moral philosophers. ↩︎
10. A characterisation anathema to historians of philosophy of Global Antiquity or the Global Middle Ages. ↩︎