The Discovery of Chinese Logic.

• Author: Lin, Xiaoqing Diana
• Position: Book review

The Discovery of Chinese Logic. By JOACHIM KURTZ. Leiden: BRILL, 2011. Pp. xiv + 474. $221.

In this original and important study, Joachim Kurtz delineates three stages in the transmission of the concept and knowledge of logic in China: the Jesuits in the 1600s, Protestant missionaries in the 1800s, and Chinese scholars in the late 1800s-early 1900s. At each stage, the transmitters were motivated by different goals. The Jesuits and Protestant missionaries hoped to spread Christianity through logical reasoning, and the Chinese literati sought in logic new symbolic resources of authority when the old symbolic resources of Confucian learning gradually lost their authority. Kurtz gives an interesting and spirited discussion of how logic was introduced by Western missionaries for transplanting a foreign religion in China and, in due course, how the Chinese appropriated logic to fill a void of authority in a changing society. This book is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject of introduction of logic into China to date. It also provides extensive glossaries of the Chinese lexicon into which logical terms were translated.

In chapter one, Kurtz begins with late seventeenth-century Jesuits' attempts to lure Chinese literati into the Christian faith through Aristotelian logic, which had been taught at Jesuit institutions to defend dogma. Logic, like philosophy, was regarded as the handmaiden of theology, and it was referred to as the route pointing to the truth of God. Many Jesuit missionaries who entered China after 1583, including Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, and Francisco Furtado, were influenced by Aristotelian logic in their training. Early translations of logical terms into Chinese were transliterations. To facilitate Chinese acceptance, logical treatises were not only written in Chinese but analogies were also drawn with terms the Chinese were familiar with. Matteo Ricci wrote extensively in Chinese to spread the idea of God largely through logical reasoning. To clarify the concepts of formal and material, Ricci likened them to the connections between yin and yang. Similarly, he rendered the translation of the universal and the particular into gong [??] (public) and si [??] (private), two concepts that frequently appeared in Confucian writings. To explain the difference between stand-alone categories and categories that were a sub-genre, Ricci resorted to traditional Chinese writings of the Warring States period such...