本文是為了闡明目前學界所稱呼「中國哲學」或「東洋哲學」的學術領域在明治時期的日本如何誕生、如何形成之一番試論。所謂「中國哲學」這樣學術領域是以「哲學」這樣的概念和學科之引進為契機而形成，並且此契機的磁石場是當時剛創立的東京大學。本文經過其創立時期教授與中國哲學相關內容的課程之費諾羅薩（Ernest F. Fenollosa）、井上哲次郎以及島田重禮三位的上課內容之分析，勾勒出江戶時代以來經學或儒學的思想內容由「哲學」的分析框架來獲得新的思想涵義之過程。如此，在德川時代原來被視為經學上的內容逐漸轉換成「人格修養」、「國民道德」等具備近代特質的倫理主張。孔孟等經學上的聖人以及戰國諸子也皆變成了「哲學家」。

This article attempts to elucidate the origin and formation of the “Chinese philosophy” or “Oriental philosophy” as an academic field which took form during the Meiji Era of Japan. The academic field called “Chinese philosophy” originated mainly from the incorporation of the discipline of philosophy into Tokyo University during the 1870s. The main scholars who contributed to the formation of this scholarly field were Ernest Fenollosa, Inoue Tetsujirō, and Shimada Chōrei. Fenollosa was the first teacher who taught the contents of Chinese thought from the viewpoint of philosophy. Inoue Tetsujirō was also the first instructor who took charge of the seminar under the title of “Oriental philosophy” in which he compared the “philosophical significance” of those early Chinese thinkers with those of their counterparts in the Western philosophical tradition. Shimada, succeeding Inoue, was another pioneer because he first taught the whole history of Chinese thought from the ancient to the Manchurian period, though Shimada himself had not received philosophy education in his youth. Their seminars have strengthened the philosophical image of traditional Chinese thinkers, and as a result, those thinkers have been all considered to be “philosophers” by the time of the early twentieth century. It was by this re-interpretation of the significance of traditional thought, especially from the perspective of ethics, that the contents of Confucian canonical studies of the Tokugawa period have been transformed into a new ideological ground for advocating the necessity of self-cultivation and so-called “national morality” in the following Taishō and Shōwa periods.