Scholarship on Russell’s Visit to China

Scholarship on Russell’s Visit to China Bernard Linsky Jan Vrhovski and Jana S. Rošker, eds. Bertrand Russell’s Visit to China: Selected Texts on the Centenary of Intercultural Dialogues in Logic and Epistemology. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Ljubljana U. P., 2021. Pp. 261. isbn: 978-961-06-0460-0. €19.90. Online: e-knjige.ff.uni-lj.si/znanstvena-zalozba/catalog/book/278. Bertrand Russell visited China from October 1920 to July 1921, where he lived in a courtyard house in Beijing with Dora Black, returning to Britain in August. Russell’s invitation to lecture at Peking University had come from professors who were members of the New Culture Movement, a movement of students and intellectuals dedicated to modernizing China in the aftermath of the 1912 revolution that ended the Ching dynasty. Young Chinese had been educated at Western universities as part of the Boxer Indemnity forced on China in the aftermath of the invasion of China some years before. Among those “returned overseas” students were Hu Shi (Hu Shih), a philosopher who had studied with John Dewey at Columbia University. 1 Another such student was Zhao Yuanren (Yuan Ren Chao), who would serve as Russell’s principal interpreter during the visit. Russell’s academic lectures consisted of a course titled “Problems of Philosophy”, an introductory series loosely following The Problems of Philosophy, a course closely following The Analysis of Mind, which was already in press in 1921, and two lectures on mathematical logic of a projected four that were cut short by Russell’s serious pneumonia that ended his lecturing in March of 1921. In addition to academic lecture courses, Russell delivered numerous lectures on education, communism and social issues while Dora Black lectured on the status of women and on the chapters of the book that they were to collaborate on upon returning from China, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization. Russell first lectured in English with Zhao interpreting into Chinese. Almost all were then published in a series of periodicals, both important newspapers and in specially designed periodicals. Jan Vrhovski and Jana S. Rošker of the Ljubljana University in Slovenia [End Page 186] have translated several essays and letters to the editor that accompanied the visit and debated the significance of Russell’s philosophy for China. They have added interpretive essays of their own to address the issue of the significance for later academic philosophy and logic in China. Although the Communist Party of China (cpc), founded soon after Russell’s departure in 1921, was opposed to Russell’s political views, his theory of knowledge and logic continued to influence what are to this day the leading universities in China, Qinghua [Tsinghua] University and Peking University in Beijing. Wang Hao had studied with Lin Juelin at Qinghua and then later at Harvard with Willard Van Quine. An echo of Russell’s visit to China can be heard in Wang’s 1960 essay on computer-generated proofs of the theorems of Principia Mathematica. Other than the end of this long thread of influence, little is known in the West of Russell’s influence in China, or indeed in China itself, after a number of Russell’s followers were denounced in the 1950s and 1960s, and all “foreign” philosophical influence was replaced by the Maoist orthodoxy. Recent developments in China have led to an increase of interest in Russell’s lectures at their centenary. The philosophy lectures are still not translated into English, although there is a project to collect and translate authoritative versions of the Chinese reports of the lectures to join the collection of Zhao Yuanren's complete works. The centenary of Russell’s visits was marked by two conferences in Beijing and a series of lectures at Peking University. From North America we have a thoroughly researched Harvard ma thesis by John Paisley, Bertrand Russell and China during and after His Visit in 1920. The Covid epidemic appears to have interfered with some other planned conferences on the visit. Paisley’s thesis, an issue of the journal Contemporary Chinese Thought, and this collection by Vrhovski and Rošker are so far the most substantial records of the visit in English since the publication of Collected...

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