Today, “Chinese logic” is routinely portrayed as one of the world’s “three great logical traditions” alongside “Greek” and “Indian logic.” Yet, until 1898, Chinese and foreign scholars agreed that China had never known, needed, or desired a field of study similar in scope and purpose to a science of reasoning. What made this drastic shift of opinion possible and how did the new view gain global credibility? How can we best reconstruct this process and what can we learn from it about the difficulties of writing non-Eurocentric histories of non-European science and thought?
