Jesuit Sources has published a new collection of essays examining the legacies of the Jesuits’ introduction of Aristotelian logic to China in 17th century. That legacy began with the collaboration between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese literati “to translate a specific part of the Cursus Conimbricensis, a set of commentaries on Aristotle’s philosophy developed by Jesuit philosophers in Coimbra, Portugal, which had become a popular manual of philosophy used throughout the world.” According to the publisher, Jesuit Logic and Late Ming China features five essays on “the relation between logic and the teaching of mathematics, the philological issues of translating western concepts in Chinese culture, and the opportunities that Aristotelian logic represented for a mutual understanding shed new light on the challenges, successes, and failures of the dialogue on the art of reasoning between China and the West in the early modern period.”
The volume is edited by Cristiano Casalini, of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Essays are contributed by Bernardo Machado Mota, Mário Santiago de Carvalho, Simone Guidi, Lu Jiang, and Casalini. Thierry Meynard, S.J., provides a foreword to the volume.
Jesuit Logic and Late Ming China is the second title in IJS Studies–Research on Jesuits and the Society of Jesus, a new imprint at Jesuit Sources is dedicated to publishing peer-reviewed secondary scholarship examining Jesuit history, spirituality, pedagogy, and other themes. The first volume in the imprint was In the School of Ignatius by Claude Pavur, S.J., as announced on the Portal to Jesuit Studies in October 2019.