Ruey-Lin Chen
Professor, Department of Philosophy
National Chung Cheng University
Photo credit: 胡儀婷
Professor Lin, Cheng-Hung (1938-2022), according to a young philosopher’s impression, is the teacher of almost all philosophical teachers in Taiwan. He unfortunately passed away on 3 June, 2022. He left a cherish legacy for the philosophy, especially the analytic philosophy, in Taiwan. This essay is to introduce Professor Lin’s great contributions to English-speaking readers.
Most philosophers in Taiwan view and categorize philosophical studies into three major categories or disciplines: Chinese philosophy, European continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In Taiwan, however, the formation of the three co-existent categories actually occurred in the 1980s, while Professor Lin got his Ph.D. degree from the department of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley and went back to become an associate professor in the department of philosophy at National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1985. During the period, there were few philosophers in Taiwan who were trained in the analytic philosophy. Most philosophical studies in Taiwan were devoted to Chinese, Indian, German and Catholic philosophy before the 1980s. Some philosophers who were at home in traditional Chinese philosophy or/and German philosophy even claimed that the analytic philosophy is too technical to be genuine philosophy. The analytic philosophy, they viewed, is xiao-dao (little way) without big wisdom.
To date, the analytic philosophy in Taiwan has become a dominant category, issuing greater influence on Taiwan society than other categories of philosophy doing. Professional analytic philosophers have taught this form of philosophy in many universities since the later 1990s and most senior ones of them got a Ph.D. degree due to the enlightenment of Professor Lin. Their interests in the analytic philosophy were ignited by Professor Lin’s teaching during the period when they were undergraduates. Most of them continued pursuing a Ph.D degree abroad; and some got it from English-speaking nations such as the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, and some studied in domestic universities and got it under the supervision of Professor Lin. They continued training the next generation of young philosophers, some of whom got a Ph.D. degree and become some universities’ faculties to teach analytic philosophy since 2010. In a significant sense, Professor Lin is the main trunk of the analytic philosophy in contemporary Taiwan, whose root is Yin, Hai-Guang (1919-1969) who come from Mainland China by following the retreating Kuo-Min-Tang (KMT) regime in 1949.
Yin, Hai-Guang, being a philosophical professor in the department of philosophy at NTU in the 1950s and 1960s, is the first philosopher who introduced the analytic philosophy to Taiwan. He taught logic and logical positivism/empiricism within the campus; and outside the campus, he advocated liberalism and criticized the conservativism of Chinese culture and KMT’s dictatorial ruling on Taiwan. Yin issued great influence on young students in universities. The KMT government hated his influential power and prohibited him to teach philosophy since 1965. The KMT authorities viewed liberalism, logical empiricism, and the analytic philosophy as being pernicious to authoritarianism and Chinese Nationalism and thus suppressed the study of Anglo-American philosophy. Fortunately, owing to the recommendation of Yin, Hai-Guang, the department of philosophy at NTU hired Lin, Cheng-Hung as a lecturer to teach logic and logical empiricism in 1967. Lin inherited Yin’s approach to promote the analytic philosophy in Taiwan after 1967. His textbook, Logic, whose first version was published in 1970, has been evaluated as the best one of the logic textbooks in Chinese as yet.
Several years later, Professor Lin felt that he should pursue an overseas Ph.D. degree to catch up the recent development of the analytic philosophy and to improve his professional ability. He went to the US to study logic and philosophy of science in the department of philosophy at University of California Berkeley two times. The first time was from 1975 to 1979 and the second from 1982 to 1985. He finally got his Ph.D. degree in 1985 when he was 45 years old. That period was a hard time for both him and Taiwan, while Professor Lin’s process of overseas studying was harder than that of most Taiwanese students who study abroad in the later time.
Professor Lin’s contributions to the philosophy in Taiwan are not only the cultivation of next generations of philosophers but also his academic work on logic and philosophy of science. Before getting his Ph.D. degree, he published several excellent papers on mathematic logic in Chinese. They are “Definite descriptive and operative symbols,” “On intensional logic,” and “Logical paradoxes and axiomatic set theory.” In the early 1980s, Professor Lin turned his interests to the philosophy of science in the logical tradition, especially the implication of eliminating scientific theoretical terms in the debate between scientific realism and instrumentalism. His dissertation Craig’s theorem and scientific instrumentalism argues that scientific instrumentalism is not endorsed by using Craig’s theorem to eliminating the theoretical terms in the formulation of a scientific theory. He published the other paper, titled “Ramsey’s eliminative method of theoretical concepts,” on the same problem. In this paper, he argues that the Ramsey’s sentence of a scientific theory supports neither scientific instrumentalism nor scientific realism. After 1985, Professor Lin continued publishing papers concerning the general philosophy of science in Chinese, including “A critical examination of covering-law model of scientific explanation,” “Karl Popper and the turn of the contemporary philosophy of science,” “Why did Galileo not accept Cardinal Bellarmine’s advice? On the conflict between Galileo and Roman Catholic Church from a philosophical view,” “On Kuhn’s notion of paradigm,” and so on. In 1993, Professor Lin and another philosopher of science, Professor Fu, Daiwie, coedited a collection (Volume 141), titled Philosophy and Conceptual History in Taiwan, for the series of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, which collected the papers contributed by philosophers and historians of science in Taiwan. All of the works have become the important part of the philosophical literature in Taiwan.
Professor Lin dedicated his life to not only philosophical education and academic research but also the establishment of philosophical organizations, say, Taiwan Philosophical Association and The Taiwan Association for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Although there is an organization of philosophers, Chinese Association of Philosophy, which was founded in Mainland China in 1928 and moved to Taiwan after 1949, it was conservative and could not reflect Taiwan’s philosophical interests after the 1980s. Professor Lin and other philosophers established a new academic organization to reflect the actual state of the philosophy in Taiwan in the 1990s. Taiwan Philosophical Association was finally established in 1997 and Professor Lin served as the first president. Although the main advocators are the analytic philosophers, the characteristic of Taiwan Philosophical Association is inclusive. It encourages and urges philosophers trained from different philosophical categories, say the analytic philosophy, European continental philosophy, and Chinese philosophy, to interact with one another.
The Taiwan Association for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science and Technology (TLMPST) is the Taiwan division of the international Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST) which is a division of International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST). This association is a professional organization whose members are the analytical philosophers, philosophers of science, and some scientists. Its purpose is to promote the interactions between philosophers of science and scientists and to communicate the philosophical work with the public. Professor Lin was always a member since it was found in 1979.
Nowadays, if relatively young analytic philosophers and philosophers of science in Taiwan can make more contributions to the philosophy in the world, then Professor Lin’s long-term cultivation and work from 1967 to 2022 should be recorded and remembered.