This Lecture Series is named after Jin Yuelin (in Chinese: 金岳霖), a pioneering philosopher and logician in China. After his study at Columbia University in the United States, he established the department of philosophy at Tsinghua University in 1926, where he started teaching modern logic for the first time in China, while engaging in deep encounters between modern and Chinese philosophy. Jin Yuelin’s personality and ideas have had a continuing impact on logicians and philosophers in China right until today. Well-known scholars will be invited to visit Tsinghua to give these lectures annually, interacting with students and researchers at the interface of logic and philosophy, broadly conceived.
Jin Yuelin Lectures 2025
Lecturer: Hannes Leitgeb is a Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich, where he holds the Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language and co-founded the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). He received the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship in 2010 and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2025. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of Academia Europaea. His work ranges across logic, epistemology, and the philosophies of language, mathematics, and science.For more information, see https://www.mcmp.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/people/faculty/hannes_leitgeb/index.html
- Lecture 1: Reviving Logical Empiricism
Logical Empiricism is widely regarded as a philosophical failure. In my lecture, I will argue that there is an (only slightly updated) “enlightened“ version of Logical Empiricism that does not exclude metaphysics or ethics and which may still serve successfully as a metaphilosophy of scientific philosophy today and in the future.
- Lecture 2: The Additive Logic of Epistemic Reasons. An Axiomatic Account
While the study of reasons is of central interest in some parts of contemporary philosophy, it is mostly ignored in others. In my lecture, I want to counter this fragmentation by suggesting a systematic logical bridge between the philosophical theory of epistemic reasons (normative reasons for belief) and Bayesian formal epistemology. If I am right, both sides can benefit from joining forces.
- Lecture 3: New Trends in Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Logic, and Philosophy of Mathematics
This lecture will discuss some of the current trends in contemporary philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics. This will also allow me to present some of my present work on the logic and semantics of conditionals, inferentialism about logic, and logicism about mathematics.