Analogical Past, Logical Modernity: Zhang Shenfu and the Confluence of Holism and Logical Method in Chinese 'Intellectual Enlightenment"

Abstract

The paper tries to show how, in the process of Chinese modernization, the attempts to integrate the modern Western logic into the Chinese intellectual agenda revolved around its universal role and function, and how this process took place within a cultural perception based on analogical reasoning and its referential ontologies (etc.). This urge to see logic as an objectivistic mechanism or tool emanated from the traditional holistic "mapping" of the patterns and complementarity of the constituent objects and categories of the world as such.

Being a sort of cosmological worldview based on analogical relations between structured parts, this holistic mode of thinking/reasoning shaped the understanding of logic and its use in social practice. Furthermore, after some scholars have, in their own way, grasped the theories of Western logic, one of the necessary steps they took next was to create analogical connections between representations or models of logic on one hand, and a broader objective reality (e. g.: human life and morality) on the other.

As an attempt to illuminate how the above described phenomenon took shape in the first decade after May Fourth movement in China (1919-1928), the paper will try to illustrate how the search for objectivity and the discovery of the notion of mathematical logic in work of Zhang Shenfu converged with construction and deconstruction of traditional holistic world view and fact-based world of science on one hand, and analogical reasoning versus logical, on the other