China and the West

Jin, Xiping. Youding Shen [ID D19402].
Jin Xiping : It is not clear whether Shen has studied Edmund Husserl's logical work directly under the guidance of Husserl himself, the only thing we know from the documents is, that he did visit Husserl during his stay in Freiburg i.B. (zwischen 1931-1934).
Shen Youding used the Husserlian model of epistemology in his research, but he rarely mentioned Husserl's name. What he wanted to do was to take the useful results of Husserl's logical investigations and clarify ideas of logical grammar in a believable or trustful manner. But it is nevertheless incorrect to completely ignore the influence of Husserl's gogical investigations on Shen's theory of logical grammar, especially of the linguistic expressions. Shen was the first to use the results of Husserl's Logical investigations in his own logical investigations and he was the first person in China to try to use Husserl's standpoint on logic to understand and interpret Russell's logical theory and Wittgenstein's critical reflections on natural and aritificial language, and to determine the very nature of linguistic expressions on the basis of the cognitive aspect of their use. He was obviously unsatisfied with both Russell's and Wittgenstein's treatment of linguistic expressions.
After 1949 Shen stopped his philosophical research and concentrated on historical research and abstract algebra and mathematical logic. After the Cultural revolution, he began to talk about philosophy, especially about Husserl and phenomenology. In his private correspondence with Wang Hao he mentioned Husserl between 1972-1981. He held that 'Husserl's Logical investigations are still the best model for philosophizing in the German language' and he interpreted Husserl's transcendental phenomenology as the 'unification of vijnaptimatrin subjective idealism, and Platonic objective idealism', and thought that such unification 'could possibly be unique'.