Balance and innovation: Approaches to logic and the teaching of logic in the philosophy department of Peking University, 1916-1927

This study lays out an overview of the main developments related to the teaching and expounding of logic at the Philosophy Department of Peking University, between the early years of the Republic and the year 1927, when the university was temporarily dissolved and reorganized into the Provisional Unified University of Peking. The objective here is to interconnect various (some not directly related) developments in the curricula that covered the teaching of logic. It describes not only the ebb and flow of general intellectual trends at Peking University but also the curricula’s place in the context of a broader discourse on logic, science, and philosophy that was rising in importance at the time. By providing a tentative picture of new intellectual trends, worldviews, and personal impacts, this study will try to show how curricular changes and views about logic were connected to changes in the engulfing intellectual climate. In particular, the focus will be on the interrelatedness of these changes with main events in contemporary new approaches worldwide to philosophy, culminating particularly in the visits of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell to the University (1919–1922), as well as a controversy over science and metaphysics, which flourished after those visits (1923).