To survive, let alone flourish, we need to be sure of—securely tied to—at least one other person. We also need to be sure of our general acceptance within the wider social world. This book explores the normative implications of taking our social needs seriously. Chapter 1 sketches out what our core social needs are, and Chapter 2 shows that they ground a fundamental, but largely neglected human right against social deprivation. Chapter 3 then argues that this human right includes a right to sustain the people we care about, and that often, when we are denied the resources to sustain others, we endure social contribution injustice. Chapters 4–6 explore the tension between our needs for social inclusion and our needs for interactional and associational freedom, showing that social inclusion must take priority. While Chapters 5 and 6 defend a narrow account of freedom of association, Chapter 7 shows that the moral ballgame changes once we have made morally messy associative decisions. Sometimes we have rights to remain in associations that we had no right to form. Finally, Chapter 8 exposes the distinct social injustices that we do to people whom we deem to be socially threatening. Overall, the book identifies ways to change our social and political practices, and our personal perspectives, to better honour the fact that we are fundamentally social beings.
Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant
This chapter begins with a discussion of humanist criticisms of scholastic logic. It then discusses the evolution of the scholastic tradition and the influence of Renaissance Aristotelianism, Descartes and his influence, the Port-Royal Logic, the emergence of a logic of cognitive faculties, logic and mathematics in the late 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s role in the history of formal logic, and Kant’s influence on logic.
Indian Logic
The chapter is an overview of Indian logic, with a general introduction followed by specialized sections on four different schools: Nyāya logic, Buddhist logic, Jaina logic, and Navya-Nyāya logic.
Indicative Conditionals
The chapter is an introduction to logical treatments of indicative conditionals, comparing truth-functional, non-truth-functional, and suppositional approaches. Some of the topics discussed are truth conditions, conditional belief, assertability, and issues with compounds of conditionals.
The Form of Truth: Hegel’s Philosophical Logic
This book is a consideration of Hegel’s view on logic and basic logical concepts such as truth, form, validity, and contradiction, and aims to assess this view’s relevance for contemporary philosophical logic. The literature on Hegel’s logic is fairly rich. The attention to contemporary philosophical logic places the present research closer to those works interested in the link between Hegel’s thought and analytical philosophy, Koch 2014, Brandom 2014, 1-15, Pippin 2016, Moyar 2017, Quante & Mooren 2018 among others). In this context, one particularity of this book consists in focusing on something that has been generally underrated in the literature: the idea that, for Hegel as well as for Aristotle and many other authors, logic is the study of the forms of truth, i.e. the forms that our thought can assume in searching for truth. In this light, Hegel’s thinking about logic is a fundamental reference point for anyone interested in a philosophical foundation of logic.
“Power in the service of love”: John Dewey’s Logic and the Dream of a Common Language
While contemporary feminist philosophical discussions focus on the oppressiveness of universality which obliterates “difference,” the complete demise of universality might hamper feminist philosophy in its political project of furthering the well-being of all women. Dewey’s thoroughly functionalized, relativized, and fallibilized understanding of universality may help us cut universality down to size while also appreciating its limited contribution. Deweyan universality may signify the ongoing search for a genuinely common language in the midst of difference.
The Dialogical Approach to Paraconsistency
Being a pragmatic and not a referential approach to semantics, the dialogical formulation of paraconsistency allows the following semantic idea to be expressed within a semi-formal system: In an argumentation it sometimes makes sense to distinguish between the contradiction of one of the argumentation partners with himself (internal contradiction) and the contradiction between the partners (external contradiction). The idea is that external contradiction may involve different semantic contexts in which, say A and not A have been asserted. The dialogical approach suggests a way of studying the dynamic process of contradictions through which the two contexts evolve for the sake of argumentation into one system containing both contexts. More technically, we show a new, dialogical, way to build paraconsistent systems for propositional and first-order logic with classical and intuitionistic features (i.e. paraconsistency both with and without tertium non-datur) and present their corresponding tableaux.
Logical Nihilism: Could there be no Logic?
Logical nihilism can be understood as the view that there are no laws of logic. This paper presents both a counterexample-based argument in favor of logical nihilism, and a way to resist it by using Lakatos’ method of lemma incorporation. The price to pay is the loss of absolute generality.
Privilege and Position: Formal Tools for Standpoint Epistemology
How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. With this foundation, we develop a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic.
Sacred Truths, Fables, and Falsehoods: Intersections between Feminist and Native American Logics
From the newsletter’s introduction: “Lauren Eichler […] examines the resonances between feminist and Native American analyses of classical logic. After considering the range of responses, from overly monolithic rejection to more nuanced appreciation, Eichler argues for a careful, pluralist understanding of logic as she articulates her suggestion that feminists and Native American philosophers could build fruitful alliances around this topic.”