Maths, medicine, philosophy and the Chinese correlative thinking

"Yijing is not a treaty of mathematics, it is a sum of completely different speculative thinking. Somebody once asked the great mathematician Laurent Schwartz the reason why mathematics was worth being study. Answer was : because mathematics is the language of physics. Actually, in Western tradition, since mathematics is the main tool of thought, physics is the queen of the sciences of nature. China is different. In China, the queen of sciences of nature is not physics, but medicine, because the main tool of thought is not mathematic, but Yijing hexagrams algebra. As a matter of fact, in medicine, causative thinking is not as suitable than correlative thinking. Symptome is obviously rather correlatted with disease than caused by desease."


Prof. Léon Vandermeersch, "Reflection on correlative thinking in Chinese Thought"