Abstract

Hao Wang, a prolific philosopher and researcher, was known for his close intellectual friendship with Kurt Gödel, his advocacy for the study of logic at Oxford, and for his path-breaking contributions to logic and automated theorem proving. Yet in a memorial volume published sixteen years after Wang’s passing, the editors Charles Parsons and Montgomery Link noted “rather little has been published on Wang’s considerable body of work or on the man’s personality and unusual personal history.” The goal of this article is to see what light Wang’s logical journey in life sheds on Chinese philosophy and the Western analytic tradition.