Logos Review · Issue 1 (Spring 2026) · Founding Statement
Logos Review
Abstract: This is the founding statement of Logos Review.
https://doi.org/10.64053/XNTG5790
Logos Review was founded to pursue a vocation.
If society may be imagined as a living body—each part serving its function—then the scholar’s duty is thought: inquiry, research, and writing. Yet this path grows harder. Though our peers remain, the intellectual landscape has grown barren. The range of subjects one can discuss in public narrows; the space for discourse contracts. If thinkers come to accept detours and long pauses, they may, in time, lose even the capacity to pose questions and to speak the truth.
The weightier the subject, the more it demands sustained cultivation. We must return to sources: excavate, analyze, and untangle ideas, and temper a language worthy of their complexity. We must cultivate a Chinese language robust enough to address, together, the questions that press upon our lives. Such work requires formation. A tradition may take a century to build, and yet be squandered in a decade or two.
Specific subjects may fall into neglect; fundamental themes do not—especially those touching survival, flourishing, justice, and love. So long as the human spirit seeks a life that is authentic, rich, deep, and humane, these themes endure. To answer their call is to quicken life, even in difficult times; if we habitually ignore or sidestep them, the rest of life withers, as though its animating soul were gone.
For this reason, we hope to create a platform where those who labor to think can read one another and converse—easing, if only a little, the uncertainty and solitude.
We seek to reclaim a Chinese that is rooted in individual lives and public life; that bears its own history and critical consciousness; and that keeps an unceasing dialogue with its circumstances and culture—at times, even a challenge. To draw nearer to truth, this language accepts discipline, becoming humbler and more capacious. It draws nourishment from other cultures without being a mere import. It should also accord with the sensibilities of contemporary readers of Chinese, uniting scholarly rigor and intellectual seriousness with grace of expression. We hope for this because thought ought to be a way of life—not an ivory tower, nor a structure without foundations.
This work also bears a trust placed upon it by others. Because each part has its function, we are mutually dependent; the fortunes of one are bound to the fortunes of all. Since our vocation is thought, we have a responsibility to articulate, with care, what many find difficult to express.
Our partners—present and future—need us.
The founding of Logos Review is our way of passing on this small flame.
August 2025
Logos Review
This is the English version of an article published in Chinese in Logos Review (汉语学志). Read the Chinese original (中文原文) · All English articles
