China Social Science Review

No.2, 2025

 

 

Liu Xinwen

 

Shen Yuting, a famous logician and philosopher in China and abroad, has made important contributions to mathematical logic. In the 1930s, he extended Henry Sheffer’s work on “finite model theory.” Beginning in the 1950s, building upon the achievements of Turing and Church, he established a series of decidable fragments for classical first-order logic—a cornerstone of mathematical logic. Based on the decision problem, we can trace the thematic focus and intellectual origins of Shen’s early papers, their continuity with his later research, and their enduring influence on subsequent generations of scholars.