The Philosophy Discipline was established at the same time as the birth of Nankai University in 1919 but was dismissed because of the National Adjustment of Colleges and Departments in 1952. Re-established in 1962, it was reorganized and renamed as Department of Philosophy. After that, some famous scholars used to be the chairpeople in charge of the department, such as Yongtong TANG, Wenqian FENG, and Gongyi WEN. Since 1994, the Philosophy Department has been listed as one of the seven ‘National Education and Research Bases of Humanities and Social Sciences’. In 2003, the department was authorized to award PHD of the primary discipline of philosophy by the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council and established the station for the post-doctorate studies of philosophy discipline with the approval of the Ministry of Education. In 2008, the philosophy discipline was chosen by the Ministry of Education as the first-class featured specialty. In 2010, the department was renamed as ‘College of Philosophy’. In 2011, supported by the college, Nankai University established the ‘Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies’. With the aim of becoming a ‘new-type think tank’, the institute devotes itself to the theoretical researches on the development of Chinese society.
The college has currently 8 teaching and researching sections including ‘Marxist Philosophy’, ‘Chinese Philosophy’, ‘Foreign Philosophy’, ‘Logics’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Aesthetics’, ‘Religious Studies’ ,‘Philosophy of Science and Technology’ . ‘Marxist Philosophy’ is a nationally ranked key discipline, ‘Marxist Philosophy’ and ‘Chinese Philosophy’ are evaluated as key disciplines of Tianjin City. Both Master and Doctoral students are enrolled in all the eight subfields of philosophy. The college has several research centers including but not limited to ‘Political Philosophy and Harmonious Society Research Center’, ‘Chinese Philosophy Research Center’, ‘Genetic and Comparative Epistemology Research Center’, and ‘Research Center of Religious Culture’.
The college always has a strong faculty. Since the re-establishment of the Philosophy Department in 1962, more than 180 staff members have been working here. Some of them are well-known leaders in their fileds (Yanqing CHEN, Keli FANG, Ruisen YANG, Qingtian CUI, Mingzhou CHE, Conghu MAO, Wenying LIU, etc.). Currently, the college has 49 full-time faculty members, including 21 professors, 19 associate professors, and 9 lecturers, also has 9 faculty postdoctoral fellow.
