“With remarkable humility and a relatable sadness Wang confronted the fact that it is much harder than he had thought to get a handle on reality and to improve it, especially in the face of political ambition. He wrote in 1979 that “the ideal of a ‘strong country with rich people’ needs to be combined with socialist ideals so as to avoid the pitfall of saving the country without saving the people and to achieve a society that is both prosperous and equal.” Wang’s faith in Marx and Mao was political, personal, and intellectual, and all three strands are woven through his philosophical work and his automated logic in ways that are deeply tied to his lived experience of being a Chinese logician in America navigating the cleavages of the Cold War. In this way, Wang proves his own point: reasoning, even in its most formal mode of logical inference and formalism, is not universal but is, rather, the product of the history of one’s mind and body.”
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725135 journals.uchicago.edu
