One hundred years of Chinese dialectical logic: An academic history of logic relating to contemporary Chinese Marxism

Abstract

The study of dialectical logic has a history of nearly one hundred years in China. It is significant for understanding both the growth of Chinese logic and the Sinicization of Marxism to review dialectical logic in the context of introducing the study of Marxism in China. Debates about dialectical logic in Chinese academic circles involve not only the problems of logic itself, but more importantly the understanding of Marxist philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s, some Marxist researchers in China were influenced by the philosophers and logicians of the former Soviet Union, and they came very close to equating dialectical logic with Marxist dialectics. They also identified the formal logic originating from ancient Greece as metaphysics, praising the former and criticizing the latter. In the upsurge of Marxist philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese logicians carried out normal and formal academic research on dialectical logic. During the period from the end of 1970s to the end of 1990s, the research and teaching of dialectical logic in China reached its heyday, and logicians performed comprehensive and detailed research on some critical issues, including the basic laws of dialectical logic, which they tried to formalize. Since the beginning of the 21st century, dialectical logic has ceased to prosper and has faded from the core field of the discipline of logic, although some honorable scholars still persist in studying it.

Keywords:

• Dialectical logic
• contemporary Chinese Marxism
• formal logic
• dialectics
• Friedrich Engels

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the philosophical circles of mainland China, professionals in logic usually refer to the traditional logic derived from Aristotle’s thought about logic by convention as xingshi luoji (formal logic), chuantong xingshi luoji (traditional formal logic) or putong luoji (general logic).

2 With respect to Engels’ discourse on dialectical logic, some Chinese scholars at present have expressed a unique opinion, holding that the term ‘dialectical logic’ proposed by Engels is not a mature, formal one. See Wang, 1998a, pp. 72-76.

3 The metaphysical thinking method here refers to the static, one-sided, and isolated way of looking at problems. The classic expression of Marxist philosophy on metaphysics is the habit of ‘observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life’. See Engels, 2010b, p. 22.

4 In the 1920s, British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell gave lectures exclusively on mathematical logic in China. In the 1920s and 1930s, Wang Dianji, Jin Yuelin and others did a lot of pioneering work in spreading modern logic. See Song, 2005, pp. 41-65.

5 For the study on dialectical logic in China since the 1980s, see Gui, 2011, pp. 52-58; Zhang, 2011, pp. 44-51.

6 This paper is not to discuss the technical process involved by the research of the formalization of dialectical logic; for relevant detailed discussions, see Zhao, 1995; Zhang, 1992, pp. 3-12.

7 For relevant information, see Zhao, 2001, p. 128; Yang, 2009, pp. 55-58.

8 For the discussion of the basic laws of dialectical logic, see Ma, 2006, pp. 273-331.

9 There is an entry relating to dialectical logic in the third volume of the Encyclopedia of China published in 2021, which specially introduces the study of dialectical logic in China, and explains the Chinese academic community’s orientation and affirmation of the work on the study of dialectical logic. https://www.zgbk.com/ecph/words?SiteID=1&ID=23530&Type=bkzyb&SubID=52011

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lei Chen

Lei Chen (PHD) is currently an associate professor in the School of Philosophy at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. Her research fields are mathematical logic, modern logic, history of logic. Her major publications include The Logic Foundations of Relative Theory; Axiomatization of Special Relativity in First Order Logic; Definable Sets in Stone Algebras; and Archetypes of Wisdom (translation, by Douglas L. Soccio), etc.

Chengbing Wang

Chengbing Wang (PHD)is a professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China, and also one of the editors of the English-language journal, Frontiers of Philosophy in China. His main research fields are American Pragmatism, postmodern philosophy, and philosophy of social identity. He has published more than ninety articles, twenty monographs, and numerous translations. His new publications are The Crisis of Identity in the Context of Modernity (2017) and The Themes of Postmodern Philosophy (edit.) (2020). He is currently heading a major national project, ‘Translation of the Philosophical Works of William James’, which will be concluded before December 2022.