One of the earliest works of distinctly Taiwanese philosophy is Lin Mosei's 1916 publication, Wang Yang-ming's Liangzhi (王陽明の良知說).
Philosophical thought can also be divided into four camps: The Kyoto School, American Pragmatism, Christian Theology, and Modern Sinology.
Li Chunsheng published a series of Christian studies after his magum opus Zhǔ jīn xīn jí (主津新集, 1896) in Yokohama and worked on comparing his religions beliefs with Confucianism.
[13] Taiwanese philosophy was not yet institutionalized until Lin Mosei's groundbreaking paper Wang Yang-ming's Liangzhi was published during his studies at the Tokyo Imperial University in 1916.
Su-Qing Lin [zh], the first Taiwanese female scholar holding a bachelor in philosophy, published her research based on the Oeuvres de Descartes by Charles Adam [fr] and Paul Tannery in 1953.
Lin Qiu-wu [zh]’s critique of Buddhism was Marxist, and Joshua Liao's pragmatist approach on reading intellectual histories was considered pioneering.
Adopting a pragmatist approach, Lin Mosei unveiled the injustice of the education policy under Japanese colonial rule and argued instead for universal human values like equality and liberty.
Other central works include Hung Yao-hsün’s review ‘View on Fūdo’ (風土文化觀) which took influence from Tetsuro Watsuji and Hegelian dialectics and phenomenology.
Zeng Tianzong's The Principles on Truth (真理原理論) was one of the recognized philosophical works in Japan, it was published by Risosha (東京理想社) and prefaced by Gen'yoku Kuwaki (桑木嚴翼).
C. K. Wu of Tainan Theological College and Seminary studied with religious philosopher Seiichi Hatano during the 1940s and was later promoted in Yale University, publishing his work Philosophy of the Religion (宗教哲學, 1940).
Fa-Yu Cheng was supervised by Nishida Kitarō, and in 1984 he transcribed An Inquiry into the Good (善的研究) and founded empirical psychology in Taiwan.
Joshua Liao [zh]'s dissertation The Individual and the Community on intellectual histories was influenced by George Herbert Mead's pragmatist social psychology.
His ‘Mín jiào yuānyù jiě’ (民教冤獄解, 1903), ‘Tiān yǎn lùn shū hòu’ (天演論書後, 1907), ‘Dōngxī zhé héng’ (東西哲衡, 1908) argued for the Christianity.
J. S. Chou was a son of the priest and the first Taiwanese to study theology in Kyoto and the United States and was made a reverend in Japan.
Engagement in politics included Lin Mosei's Mingpao (民報), Chin-sui Hwang's Hsin-hsin (新新), Joshua Liao [zh] and his brother Thomas's Avant-garde (前鋒), Hung Yao-hsün and Shenqie Zhang's New Taiwan (新台灣).
C. K. Wu held his deanship of Tainan Theological College and Seminary and devoted himself to sustaining the intellectual lineage of Taiwanese philosophy.
Cheng Nan-jung, a graduate from philosophy and a dissident magazine founder, argued for freed of speech, body, and mind.
"[34] Systemic research on Taiwanese philosophers from Joshua Liao, Li Chunsheng, Hung Yao-hsün[35][4][36][37] included two works published in 2016[38] and 2019.