Background
Youding Shen was born in 1908 in Shanghai, China.
沈有鼎
Youding Shen was born in 1908 in Shanghai, China.
Youding Shen was a student of Jin Yuelin and a teacher of Wang Hao. As a student, he was Quine's contemporary at Harvard.
Youding Shen was a powerful logician and a sensitive historian of Chinese logic, especially that which appeared in Moist texts.
He had wide interests in Chinese and Western philosophy, with good Greek and a close understanding of Wittgenstein’s Traclatus.
Youding Shen published little, but his writings and lecture courses all had impact. His work on the Moist Canon provided a precise and systematic reconstruction of Moist logic and corrected earlier textual misunderstandings. In his work on Western logic, Shen discussed such topics as semantic paradox, strict implication, quantification and the logical structure of language.