Still reading Peter Watson’s mammoth book on the history of ideas. Here’s another section I found interesting, presented without comment:
To give another example, ‘Mountain big’ is a complete sentence in Chinese. It is not necessary to use the verb ‘to be’. “Without the subject-predicate pattern of sentence structure,” says Zhou Youguang, “the Chinese did not develop the idea of the law of identity in logic or the concept of substance in philosophy. And without these concepts, there could be no idea of causality or science. Instead, the Chinese develop[ed] correlational logic, analogical thought, and relational thinking, which though inappropriate to science, are highly useful in socio-political theory. That is why the bulk of Chinese philosophy is philosophy of life.”