Being rude is often more gratifying and enjoyable than being polite. Likewise, rudeness can be a more accurate and powerful reflection of how I feel and think. This is especially true in a political environment that can make being polite seem foolish or naive. Civility and ordinary politeness are linked both to big values, such as respect and consideration, and to the fundamentally social nature of human beings. This book explores the powerful temptations to incivility and rudeness, but argues that they should generally be resisted. Drawing on early Chinese philosophers who lived during great political turmoil but nonetheless sought to “mind their manners,” it articulates a way of thinking about politeness that is distinctively social. It takes as a given that we can feel profoundly alienated from others, and that other people can sometimes be truly terrible. Yet because we are social neglecting the social and political courtesies comes at great cost. The book considers not simply why civility and politeness are important, but how. It addresses how small insults can damage social relations, how separation of people into tribes undermines our better interests, and explores how bodily and facial expressions can influence how life with other people goes. It is especially geared toward anyone who feels the temptation of being rude and wishes it were easier to feel otherwise. It seeks to answer a question of great contemporary urgency: When so much of public and social life with others is painful and fractious, why should I be polite?

This article argues for a right to explanation, on the basis of its necessity to protect the interest in what I call informed self- advocacy from the serious threat of opacity. The argument for the right to explanation proceeds along the lines set out by an interest- based account of rights (Section II). Section III presents and motivates the moral importance of informed self- advocacy in hierarchical, non- voluntary institutions. Section IV argues for a right to so- called rule- based normative and causal explanations, on the basis of their necessity to protect that interest. Section V argues that this protection comes at a tolerable cost.

‘Logical Realism’ is taken to mean many different things. I argue that if reality has a privileged structure, then a view I call metaphysical logical realism is true. The view says that, first, there is ‘ One True Logic ’ ; second, that the One True Logic is made true by the mind ‐ and ‐ language ‐ independent world; and third, that the mind ‐ and ‐ language ‐ independent world makes it the case that the One True Logic is better than any other logic at capturing the structure of reality. Along the way, I discuss a few alternatives, and clarify two distinct kinds of metaphysical logical realism.

This entry presents the framework of « dialogical logic » in the initial Lorenzen and Lorenz tradition. The rules for the game and for building strategies are provided with step by step examples, helping the reader understand how the dialogue tables reflect a dynamic process of interaction between the players. Various logics are presented within this pluralistic framework: intuitionist logic, classical logic, and modal logics, with references to various other logics. In a second part of the entry, objections against the framework are considered, together with answers provided by the « Immanent Reasoning » variant, which stays within the Lorenzen and Lorenz tradition, and by the « Built-In Opponent » variant first developed by Catarina Dutilh Novaes, which develops a different dialogical tradition.

Anti-exceptionalists about formal logic think that logic is continuous with the sciences. Many philosophers of science think that there is feminist science. Putting these two things together: can anti-exceptionalism make space for feminist logic? The answer depends on the details of the ways logic is like science and the ways science can be feminist. This paper wades into these details, examines five different approaches, and ultimately argues that anti-exceptionalism makes space for feminist logic in several different ways.

Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that
ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we
are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we
then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what
exactly this composition relation is. Composition as Identity (CI) is the view that the composition
relation is the identity relation. While such a view has some advantages, there are many arguments
against it. In this essay, I discuss several versions of the most common objection against CI, and
show how the CI theorist can maintain that these arguments – contrary their initial intuitive
appeal – are nonetheless unsound.

Introduction: Plumwood’s second essay uses logical distinctions to map the difficult terrain of feminist theories of difference. By carefully distinguishing among forms of difference, Plumwood refutes attempts by some feminist theorists to identify dichotomous thinking with oppressive thinking.

From the Introduction: "Anne Waters shows how nondiscrete nonbinary ontologies of being operate as background framework to some of America’s Indigenous languages. This background logic explains
why and how gender, for example, can be understood as a non-essentialized concept in
some Indigenous languages of the Americas. [...] The Indigenous understanding that all things interpenetrate and are relationally interdependent embraces a manifold of complexity, resembling a world of multifariously associated connections and intimate fusions Such a nondiscretely aggregate ontology ought not to be expected to easily give way to a metaphysics of a sharply defined discretely organized binary ontology. From an Indigenous ontology, some multigendered identities may be more kaleidoscopic and protean concepts than Euro-American culture has yet to imagine."

People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women’s college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women’s athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters.

This paper starts out from two feminist criticisms of classical logic, namely Andrea Nye’s general rejection of logic and Val Plumwood’s criticism of the standard notion of negation in classical logic. I then look at some of Gottlob Frege’s reflections on negation in one of his later Logical Investigations. It will appear clear that Frege’s notion of negation is not easily pegged in the general category of ‘Otherness’ that Plumwood uses to characterize negation in classical logic. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the claim that the adversarial method of argumentation in philosophy is hostile to feminist goals and perhaps responsible for the low numbers of women engaged in academic philosophy. Against this hypothesis, I claim that a more naturalistic perspective on logic can avoid essentialism and provide a feminist friendly and pluralist view of logic, human reasoning, and philosophical argumentation.