Lund Circle of East Asian Linguistics (LCEAL) seminar

Title: Logic and the philosophy of language in Meiji Japan: the unity of the proposition, judgment, and logical form

Speaker: Lars Larm (Gothenburg)

 

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Abstract

In this talk, I will explore how traditional European logic was introduced in Meiji Japan, and its relevance for ideas about language. I will begin with the European background, focusing on the analysis of the proposition in terms of subject, copula, and predicate, and on related questions concerning judgment and the relation between grammatical expression and logical structure. I will then turn to Meiji Japan and consider how this tradition was introduced through teaching and translated works. The overall aim of this research is to understand how logicians during this period, working within the theory they employed, gave consistent accounts of linguistic phenomena, and to uncover linguistic insights that may be concealed behind terminology that, from a contemporary perspective, may seem unfamiliar. Through this discussion, I hope to show that the history of traditional logic is also part of the history of the philosophy of language in modern Japan.