From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist dialectics: Chinese interpretations of Gongsun Longzi
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From Mohism to the school of names, from pragmatism to materialist dialectics: Chinese interpretations of Gongsun Longzi as a text and source of Chinese logic, 1919–1937 Jan Vrhovski1
Received: 19 July 2020 / Revised: 28 September 2020 / Accepted: 1 October 2020 / Published online: 17 November 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
Abstract This article aims at providing a general overview of the development of interpretational discourse on Gongsun Longzi (公孫龍子) as a text in Chinese logic in the timeframe between the May Fourth events in 1919 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. In my attempt to highlight the main interpretational approaches to the text and philosophy of Gongsun Long (公孫龍, 320 BC-250 BC) I will, on one hand, focus on the question whether or how the Western philosophies and notions of logic, such as for instance that of pragmatism, analytic philosophy and dialectical materialism, influenced the above-mentioned interpretations. On the other hand, aside from its contextual evolution I will also try to cast some new light on the main milestones of its textual re-emergence and development in the early Republican period. Keywords Gongsun Longzi · Chinese logic · history of logic · Republican China
Introduction The present study sets out from the emergence of Hu Shi’s theory of origins and development of “ancient Chinese logical method,” which, as I will try to show, was intimately related to pragmatism and experimental logic. Subsequently, I will also try to analyze the pivotal role of the work Gongsun Longzi in the discourse on Chinese logic in the 1920s and 1930s. The reemergence of the text in the 1920s was namely pivotal for the development of the modern idea of Chinese logic (also referred to as mingxue 名學 or bianxue 辯學) and particularly central to the * Jan Vrhovski [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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contemporary debate on the genealogical relation between (neo-)Mohist dialectics (Mobian 墨辯) and the School of Names (Mingjia 名家). The motion that Gongsun Long did not belong to the orthodox Mohist school of Chinese logic, which emerged in the later stage of the debates, has namely opened up the possibility that the Gongsun Longzi had in fact contained a different, more advanced variety of logic compared to that of Mohists. In the later parts of the article, I will also expound on how the above-mentioned debates caused, initially, a rise in reproduction of older (mainly Qing dynasty) commentaries and editions of the text, and, in turn, a modern reinvention of Chinese tradition in newly written commentaries on the text. Finally, I will also examine how the spread of ideas from modern Western philosophy and modern notions of logic affected the trends in interpretations of the text and how, in confluence of a constantly shifting notion of Chinese logic, it slowly assumed the post at the forefront of the discourse on Chinese logic in Marxis
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