The Study Of Cui Qingtian’s Logic Theory

Cui Qingtian is a famous contemporary logical scholar who has many achievements in the study on the history of Chinese logic. Having devoted most of his time to the educational instruction and scientific research on logic, he has put forward many original opinions on the history of Chinese logic. At the same time, he has greatly promoted the communication between Taiwan and the mainland on the history of Chinese logic, besides international communication.The paper is divided into three parts. Part Ⅰ is a short introduction to Cui Qingtian himself, and there is also a summary of the main content and research status of Cui Qingtian’s logical thoughts. Part Ⅱ is the exploration to Cui Qingtian’s logical thoughts,including five chapters,which is the most important part of this paper. This section involves Cui Qingtian’s logic views, research methods and the contents of his research:firstly, he put forward the logical pluralism associated with the relation between logic and culture, while he also gave some groundings that support his view; secondly, he summarized the disadvantages of the "Explaining the Chinese text by appeal to the Western criteria" method, and he figured out that the right approach to the research should be a comparative method and the cultural interpretation, based on which he carried out the research on specific content; thirdly, there are Cui Qingtian’s comparative logic study, the name theory and argumentation theory. Cui Qingtian’s comparative logic study focuses on Mohist logic and Aristotle’s logic. In the process of the comparison, he used the aforementioned methods. The key point of comparative method is to distinguish it from the method of analogy. The core of analogy is to find the same aspects between two things, while the core of comparison is to find the different aspects between two things. In the process of comparison, we should regard the two things as equal parties. The impact of the cultural interpretation method is to give a reason to the different results of the comparison. We should put the two kinds of logic in different cultural backgrounds for analysis. This comparative process can be regarded as two different levels. The first level is the comparison with regard to the ontological content of the two aspects, while the second level is the comparison with regard to the different ways of thinking. This is the most striking feature of Cui Qingtian’s comparative logical study. In this respect, Cui Qingtian sorted out the main contents of the name theory and argumentation theory. At the same time, he clarified the connection among the name theory, argumentation theory and western logic. Part III is a review of Cui Qingtian’s logical thoughts. It includes a summary of Cui Qingtian’s contributions to logic study and his revelations on the future development of the history of Chinese logic. In Cui Qingtian’s opinions, we should connect the logical questions with culture closely. Many scholars put forward their own opinions on the basis of this perspective. Although these opinions are still immature, however, as long as we make hypotheses bravely and seek confirmation carefully, the paths and clues of the research on the history of Chinese logic will become much clearer.This paper is a study of Cui Qingtian’s logical thoughts on the history of Chinese logic.Based on Cui Qingtian’s publications, I have made great effort to obtain a comprehensive understanding of Cui’s research. During the process, there is a detailed instruction of Cui Qingtian’s research contents and the methods that he used. At the same time, two levels are distinguished strictly, and the contents are organized well. In the conclusion part, the paper makes comments on the value and influence of Cui Qingtian’s thoughts.