Abstract
A reviewer cannot be given a more pleasurable task than to review a book which on one hand excels in both consistency and complexity, and on the other hand represents a new innovative contribution to the field of his interest. Professor Kurtz's work represents a thorough and terse overview of history of logic in China, from the first waves of the Western traditional logic being introduced to China, to the Chinese discovery of Chinese logic in the last decade of the Qing dynasty.
The aspects of the work which have to be considered as its most precious contribution both to historiography of logic (as a notion and as a discipline) as well as to the studies of intellectual history in China, pertain to its masterful integration of the history of the linguistic appropriation of logical notions, the epistemic process of emulation of the discourse and finally historical aspects such as publishing history, institutional history and political circumstances of the entry of the Western logic into the public discourse. Professor Kurtz's book reveals the vital importance of the analysis of the history of terminology accompanying an introduction of any Western scientific discipline into Chinese epistemic environment, but further also illustrates that the notion of the epistemic gap in the study of the same process can be a concept which obscures the intricate web and a complex path of emulation in the background, the linguistic data being the one of the most potent "archaeological" traces of that process.
I will give a brief summary of the book's structure and content in the following paragraphs.