Diversity Reading List

Introduction: Though it is hardly uncontroversial, the thesis that logic is normative enjoys widespread agreement—probably just about as much agreement as one is ever likely to find in philosophy. There is far less agreement, however, on what exactly this thesis amounts to. To begin with, proponents of the
thesis can’t seem to agree on whether the normative authority of logic is robust or weak. If logic is robustly normative, it has a normative authority that is independent of our attitudes or conventions; if it is weakly normative, it has a normative au- thority that is entirely dependent on our attitudes or conventions. This fundamental disagreement about the normative authority of logic seems to leave little room for any point of agreement among the proponents of the thesis. Furthermore, some opponents of the thesis allow that logic is “entangled” with the normative to the extent that it has normative consequences that are instrumental to the achievement of our wider goals (Russell 2017). This makes it difficult to discern any daylight between the views of those who hold that logic is not normative and those who hold that it is only weakly so. In the next section, I will argue that the thesis that unites the proponents and excludes the opponents is that logical statements and the judgments they can be used to express—such as those concerning logical validity or logical entailment—are normative statements and judgments, in the sense that they analytically, semantically, or conceptually have normative consequences. In section 3, I will critically assess whether logical statements and judgments are indeed normative in this sense. I will consider the prospects of various accounts of what the normative consequences of logical statements or judgments might be, and find them all to be wanting. This, I claim, gives us good reason to deny that logic is normative.

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.