Ideals of Balance and Innovation: A Perspective on Logic and Curricular Change at the Philosophical Department of Peking University, 1916-1927
Abstract
This study aims at presenting an overview of main developments related toteaching and expounding of notion of logic at the philosophical department ofPeking University, between the early years of the Republic and the year 1927,when the university was temporarily dissolved and reorganised into the provisional unified university of Peking. The main objective of this writing will be to bind and interconnect individual, and seemingly unrelated, logic-related developments in the curriculum into one single narrative, describing not only the ebbs and flows of general intellectual trends at Peking University, but also their place in the overall context of the main discourse on logic, science and philosophy at the time.
By providing a tentatively webbed network of notions, worldviews and personal influences, this study will try to show how the curricular change and idea of logic was concomitant with the change in intellectual climate. In particular, the focus will be on interrelatedness of these changes with main events in the contemporary intellectual history, such as the visits of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell at the university (1919-1922), as well as the Science and Metaphysics debate, which broke out a year later (1923).