Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 7, The Social Background, Part 1, Language and Logic in Traditional China

"Joseph Needham's masterpiece, chronicling the scientific and technical achievements of the world's oldest continuous civilization, has by now illuminated almost every aspect of the intellectual history of East Asia." David Wright, Isis

• Foreword Joseph Needham; Preface; SECTION 49: LANGUAGE AND LOGIC IN TRADITIONAL CHINA; A: METHOD: 1. Methodological remarks; 2. The history of the study of classical Chinese language and logic in the West; B: TYPOLOGY: 1. The place of Chinese among East Asian languages; 2. Spoken Chinese and the semiotics of Chinese characters; 3. Traditional Chinese comments on language; 4. The art of definition; 5. Dictionaries in traditional China; 6. The art of grammar in traditional China; 7. The art of literacy in traditional China; C: LOGIC: 1. Negation and the law of double negation in classical Chinese; 2. Logical sentence connectives; 3. Logical quantifiers; 4. Lexical and grammatical categories; 5. Logical and grammatical explicitness; 6. Logical and grammatical complexity in classical Chinese; D: SENTENCES: 1. Punctuation and the concept of a sentence; 2. The concept of meaning; 3. The concept of truth; 4. The concept of necessity; 5. The concept of contradiction; 6. The concept of a class; 7. Abstraction and the concept of a property; 8. The concept of subsumption; 9. The concepts of knowledge and belief; E: RATIONALITY: 1. Argumentation and rationality in early China; 2. Some forms of argument in ancient China; F: HUI SHIH: 1. Teng Hsi and Hui Shih; 2. Kungsun Lung and the White Horse dialogue; Appendix to 2. The mass noun hypothesis and the part-whole analysis of the White Horse dialogue; 3. Hsun Tzu's logic; 4. Later Mohist logic; 5. Chinese reactions to ancient Chinese disputation and logic; 6. Logical thought in the 3rd century; G: BUDDHIST LOGIC: 1. History of Buddhist logic; 2. The system of Buddhist logic; 3. The argument for consciousness only; 4. The translation of logic from Sanskrit to Chinese; 5. Contrasts between Yin Ming and Aristotelian logic; CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS; Bibliography; Index.