Diversity Reading List

This chapter gives a survey of the field of philosophy where the philosophical foundations of modern logic were discussed and where such themes of logic were discussed that were on the borderline between logic and other branches of the philosophical enterprise, such as metaphysics and epistemology. The contributions made by Gottlob Frege and Charles Peirce are included since their work in logic is closely related to and also strongly motivated by their philosophical views and interests. In addition, the chapter pays attention to a few philosophers to whom logic amounted to traditional Aristotelian logic and to those who commented on the nature of logic from a philosophical perspective without making any significant contribution to the development of formal logic.

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.

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.

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.

Logicians have always found inspiration for new research in the ordinary language that is used on a daily basis and acquired naturally in childhood. Whereas the logical issues in the foundations of mathematics motivated the development of mathematical logic with its emphasis on notions of proof, validity, axiomatization, decidability, consistency, and completeness, the logical analysis of natural language motivated the development of philosophical logic with its emphasis on semantic notions of presupposition, entailment, modality, conditionals, and intensionality. The relation between research programs in both mathematical and philosophical logic and natural language syntax and semantics as branches of theoretical linguistics has increased in importance throughout the last fifty years. This chapter reviews the development of one particularly interesting and lively area of interaction between formal logic and linguistics—the semantics of natural language. Research in this emergent field has proved fruitful for the development of empirically, cognitively adequate models of reasoning with partial information, sharing or exchanging information, dynamic interpretation in context, belief revision and other cognitive processes.

Val Plumwood’s 1993 paper, “The politics of reason: towards a feminist logic” (hence- forth POR) attempted to set the stage for what she hoped would begin serious feminist exploration into formal logic – not merely its historical abuses, but, more importantly, its potential uses. This work offers us: (1) a case for there being feminist logic; and (2) a sketch of what it should resemble. The former goal of Plumwood’s paper encourages feminist theorists to reject anti-logic feminist views. The paper’s latter aim is even more challenging. Plumwood’s critique of classical negation (and classical logic) as a logic of domination asks us to recognize that particular logical systems are weapons of oppression. Against anti-logic feminist theorists, Plumwood argues that there are other logics besides classical logic, such as relevant logics, which are suited for feminist theorizing. Some logics may oppress while others may liberate. We provide details about the sources and context for her rejection of classical logic and motivation for promoting relevant logics as feminist.

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.

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.

This chapter asks whether there is any such thing as feminist logic. It defines feminism and logic, and then goes on to present and evaluate four possible views, introducing and critiquing the work of Andrea Nye, Val Plumwood, and Susan Stebbing. It argues that Stebbing’s approach—on which feminism is one among many political applications of logic—is correct, but that feminist logic could do more, by providing a formal framework for the study of social hierarchies, much as it presently provides a formal framework for the study of numbers and similarity rankings among possible worlds.

In this paper, we provide a recipe that not only captures the common structure of semantic paradoxes but also captures our intuitions regarding the relations between these paradoxes. Before we unveil our recipe, we first discuss a well-known schema introduced by Graham Priest, namely,the Inclosure Schema. Without rehashing previous arguments against the Inclosure Schema, we contribute different arguments for the same concern that the Inclosure Schema bundles together the wrong paradoxes. That is, we will provide further arguments on why the Inclosure Schema is both too narrow and too broad. We then spell out our recipe. The recipe shows that all of the following paradoxes share the same structure: The Liar, Curry’s paradox, Validity Curry, Provability Liar, Provability Curry, Knower’s paradox, Knower’s Curry, Grelling-Nelson’s paradox, Russell’s paradox in terms of extensions, alternative Liar and alternative Curry, and hitherto unexplored paradoxes.We conclude the paper by stating the lessons that we can learn from the recipe, and what kind of solutions the recipe suggests if we want to adhere to the Principle of Uniform Solution.