History of Chinese Logic, Argumentation, & Rhetoric to 1950:
Essential Bibliography

Compiled by Ralph Dumain

Biderman, Shlomo; Scharfstein, Ben-Ami; eds. Rationality in Question: on Eastern and Western Views of Rationality. Leiden; New York: Brill, 1989.

Bloom, Alfred H. The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: a Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981.

Chmielewski, Janusz. Language and Logic in Ancient China: Collected Papers on the Chinese Language and Logic, edited by Marek Mejor. Warsaw: Polska Akademia Nauk, 2009.

Gentz, Joachim; Meyer, Dirk; eds. Literary Forms of Argument in Early China. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015.

Graham, A. C. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle: Open Court, 1989.

——————. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press; London: School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, 1978.

——————. Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature. Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, National University of Singapore, 1986; Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Chapter “‘Being’ in Western Philosophy Compared with Shih/Fei and Yu/Wu in Chinese Philosophy,” pp. 322-359, is based on Graham, 1967 (see below), with the addition of an Appendix: The supposed vagueness of Chinese.

Hansen, Chad. Language and Logic in Ancient China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.

Harbsmeier, Christoph. Science and Civilisation in China [by Joseph Needham]. Vol. 7.1: Language and Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hofmann, Martin; Kurtz, Joachim; Levine, Ari Daniel; eds. Powerful Arguments: Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020.

Hu Shi. The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922. 2nd ed., with introduction by Hyman Kublin. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1963.

Kurtz, Joachim. The Discovery of Chinese Logic. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Leslie, Donald. Argument by Contradiction in Pre-Buddhist Chinese Reasoning. Canberra: Australian National University, Center of Oriental Studies, 1964.

Lu Xing. Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E.: a Comparison with Classical Greek Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1998.

Mou, Bo, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions, La Salle: Open Court, 2001.

Reding, Jean-Paul. Comparative Essays in Early Greek and Chinese Rational Thinking. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Sun, Zhongyuan. The Mojing: Origins and Development of Mohist Logic, translated by Daniel Sarafinas. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2024. (Modern Chinese Philosophy; vol. 25)

Wardy, Robert. Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (Needham Research Institute Studies; 2).

Scientism & Modernization of Chinese Thought

Brière, O. Fifty Years of Chinese Philosophy, 1898-1950, translated from the French by Laurence G. Thompson, preface by E. R. Hughes. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956 [French ed., 1949].

Chang, Hao. Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890-1911). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Chiu, King Pong. Thomé H. Fang, Tang Junyi and Huayan Thought: A Confucian Appropriation of Buddhist Ideas in Response to Scientism in Twentieth-Century China. Boston: Brill, 2016.

Hammerstrom, Erik J. The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. (Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies)

Jenco, Leigh, ed. Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016.

Kwok, D. W. Y. Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

Makeham, John, ed. Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2012.

Wang, Hui. The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought [abridgement, translation], edited by Michael Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2023.

Journal & Book Articles

Banu, Ion. "The Graphic Figure and the Philosophical Abstraction", in: Contemporary East European Philosophy, Vol. III, edited by Edward D'Angelo, David H. DeGrood, Dale Riepe (Bridgeport, CT: Spartacus Books, 1971), pp. 244-259.

Benesch, Walter; Wilner, Eduardo. "Continuum Logic: A Chinese Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding in Philosophy and Science," Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 4, December 2002, pp. 471-494.

Fung, Y.-M. “Reason and Unreason in Chinese Philosophy,” in Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, edited by T[zu]-W[ei] Hung and T[imothy] J[oseph] Lane (Amsterdam; Boston: Academic Press, 2017), pp. 149-172.

Graham, A. C. “‘Being’ in Classical Chinese,” in The Verb ‘Be’ and Its Synonyms; Philosophical and Grammatical Studies; Part 1. Classical Chinese, Athapaskan, Mundari, edited by John W. M. Verhaar (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1967), pp. 1-39.

The Verb ‘Be’ and Its Synonyms book series

Lee, T. M. “Does Classical Chinese Philosophy Reveal Alternative Rationalities?” in Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, edited by T[zu]-W[ei] Hung and T[imothy] J[oseph] Lane (Amsterdam; Boston: Academic Press, 2017), pp. 195-211.

Mills, C. Wright. “The Language and Ideas of Ancient China,” in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, edited and with an Introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books; Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 469-520. Originally: “The Language and Ideas of Ancient China: Marcel Granet’s Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge” (1940, University of Wisconsin, Department of Sociology; privately mimeographed and previously unpublished).

Some interesting sociological & ideological observations, but Granet’s contention that Chinese thought eschews abstraction is not tenable.  See also Fung, above.

Vallverdú, Jordi. "Brains, Language and the Argumentative Mind in Western and Eastern Societies. The Fertile Differences Between Western-Eastern Argumentative Traditions," Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Volume 131, December 2017, pp. 424-431. Preprint.

Wang, E. H. “Reason and Emotion in Xunzi’s Moral Psychology,” in Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, edited by T[zu]-W[ei] Hung and T[imothy] J[oseph] Lane (Amsterdam; Boston: Academic Press, 2017), pp. 259-276.

“Scientism, Romanticism and Social Realist Images of Science”
by Aant Elzinga

“What is the Relationship Between Logic and Reality?”
by R. Dumain

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A Guide

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