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Thinking and Being
Opposing a long-standing orthodoxy of the Western philosophical tradition running from ancient Greek thought until the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that psychological laws of thought―those that explicate how we in fact think―must be distinguished from logical laws of thought―those that formulate and impose rational requirements on thinking. Logic does not describe how we actually think, but only how we should. Yet by thus sundering the logical from the psychological, Frege was unable to explain certain fundamental logical truths, most notably the psychological version of the law of non-contradiction―that one cannot think a thought and its negation simultaneously.
Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being marks a radical break with Frege’s legacy in analytic philosophy, exposing the flaws of his approach and outlining a novel conception of judgment as a two-way capacity. In closing the gap that Frege opened, Kimhi shows that the two principles of non-contradiction―the ontological principle and the psychological principle―are in fact aspects of the very same capacity, differently manifested in thinking and being.
As his argument progresses, Kimhi draws on the insights of historical figures such as Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein to develop highly original accounts of topics that are of central importance to logic and philosophy more generally. Self-consciousness, language, and logic are revealed to be but different sides of the same reality. Ultimately, Kimhi’s work elucidates the essential sameness of thinking and being that has exercised Western philosophy since its inception.
Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being marks a radical break with Frege’s legacy in analytic philosophy, exposing the flaws of his approach and outlining a novel conception of judgment as a two-way capacity. In closing the gap that Frege opened, Kimhi shows that the two principles of non-contradiction―the ontological principle and the psychological principle―are in fact aspects of the very same capacity, differently manifested in thinking and being.
As his argument progresses, Kimhi draws on the insights of historical figures such as Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein to develop highly original accounts of topics that are of central importance to logic and philosophy more generally. Self-consciousness, language, and logic are revealed to be but different sides of the same reality. Ultimately, Kimhi’s work elucidates the essential sameness of thinking and being that has exercised Western philosophy since its inception.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2018
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440 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 15, 2018
"Frege’s work cannot be subjected to the same critique since the logical use of 'I' can be associated with the judgment stroke or with assertoric form. Frege’s account of judgment must be rejected as inadequate, not because it gives no place for the logical 'I,' but because it logically dissociates two notions of judgment: my judgment, which is expressed by assertoric form, and the judgment I ascribe to others as propositional attitudes in indirect discourse."
In just over 150 pages of dense text, Kimhi seeks to overturn the reigning Fregean orthodoxy concerning the distinction between direct and indirect discourse, the distinction between asserting p and ascribing the belief that p to another person. In doing this, Kimhi presents a radically different understanding of the relationship between thought and being. The author exposes a number of different shortcomings in contemporary positions, showing how his view provides a more plausible account of issues ranging from negation, the relationship between direct and indirect discourse, and the nature of judgement. The book will likely prove to a touchstone of future debates.
In just over 150 pages of dense text, Kimhi seeks to overturn the reigning Fregean orthodoxy concerning the distinction between direct and indirect discourse, the distinction between asserting p and ascribing the belief that p to another person. In doing this, Kimhi presents a radically different understanding of the relationship between thought and being. The author exposes a number of different shortcomings in contemporary positions, showing how his view provides a more plausible account of issues ranging from negation, the relationship between direct and indirect discourse, and the nature of judgement. The book will likely prove to a touchstone of future debates.
January 7, 2022
Incredible and ambitious book. Kimhi has a remarkable breadth of philosophical knowledge (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, McDowell) that he draws upon in a way that effortlessly weaves historical scholarship and contempory issues together. While my Frege is not up to snuff, I think Kimhi's negative case against Frege leaves a bit wanting. However, at worst this means that his account is one of two possible contenders, and the positive case in favour of Kimhi's is rather strong.
December 11, 2021
Brilliant
July 21, 2018
The most important philosophy book after Wittgenstein's PI!
June 24, 2020
One of the most difficult works I've ever read, and as such, hard to evaluate with much confidence. I think Kimhi's ideas can be usefully separated into a critical and a positive project. I am unsure about the success of either project and am somewhat skeptical of Kimhi's style and aspirations to mysticism, but think there is much of value on both fronts. On the critical side, his exposition of problems with Frege -- separation of force/content, accounting for propositional unity, marking the difference between concept/function, validating Kimhi's syllogisms, (others I'm forgetting?) -- are all very good. I'm unsure if he is always reading Frege fairly and have seen some criticism to suggest he is not, but much of what he says matches my understanding of Frege, and I think the arguments he presents against Fregean conceptions of things tend to be strong. Particularly on the force/content distinction, which I came into this book already biased against, I enjoyed Kimhi's attack. Of his positive proposals, there is much I find intriguing and worth exploring. His notion of the syncategorematic seems on to something. The idea of the "dominant unity" of the positive predicate and the negative seems to match some of Brandom's arguments about how concepts come to be determinate, and I like what he has to say about how the syncategorematic allows for his syllogisms. That being said, I don't think he is ever at all clear enough about what the syncategorematic actually is, in a way that is not mystical, and some of the consequences of his psycho-logical monism about the inability to impute a contradiction to someone seem in need of refinement. I think the central Wittgestein quote he uses about "thinking being something unique" misunderstands the fact that LW's quoted interlocutors should be taken as misguided, and his attempt at a rationalist sort of mysticism I think is misguided in precisely the way LW's comment wants to avoid. Robert Hanna's criticism that Kimhi is operating within a conceptualist framework seems right to me, though I do not necessarily agree with Hanna that all of Kimhi's positive suggestions should be trashed as a result. So I leave this book very intrigued by Kimhi's claims. I would like to know more about what the Frege defender would say in response, and I would like to see more about what the syncategorematic comes to. It is a clear virtue of the book that it provokes so much thought and questioning. But it could probably provoke a little less questioning if Kimhi decided to write in a clearer fashion, and not lean in so hard towards the mysticism. I admire his attempts at grandiosity (and the book is taking on fundamental questions), but at this point am not convinced he totally earns it.
September 29, 2025
This book gives exciting glimpses into the history of philosophy and builds towards an incredibly elegant argument for the unity of thinking and being (a statement which itself requires a deep background in analytic philosophy to unpack).
Kimhi is bringing wisdom from more esoteric philosophers like Heidegger and Freud (if only implicitly) into the analytic world to resolve entrenched debates across the interpretation of ancient texts as well as contemporary open questions about the relationship between mind and world. In a sense, he is pushing analytic philosophers from Kantianism to phenomenology in a rigorous and genealogically rich way.
Awesome, ambitious, and remarkably fresh for a work of analytic philosophy.
Kimhi is bringing wisdom from more esoteric philosophers like Heidegger and Freud (if only implicitly) into the analytic world to resolve entrenched debates across the interpretation of ancient texts as well as contemporary open questions about the relationship between mind and world. In a sense, he is pushing analytic philosophers from Kantianism to phenomenology in a rigorous and genealogically rich way.
Awesome, ambitious, and remarkably fresh for a work of analytic philosophy.
September 8, 2018
Answers the question of being, finally!!
September 22, 2018
He did it... Kimhi has lifted the logjam formed by so many philosophers' last words on the topic arguably closest to heart
Want to read
July 7, 2019This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2022
Irad is a living great mind.
June 15, 2019
Parmenides’ poem (On Nature) poses a lot of challenges for the history of philosophy afterwards. Kimhi focuses on Parmenides’ goddess’ distinction between two paths — the path, as Kimhi takes them, of “is” and the path of “is not”.
The two paths are also called “the way of Truth” and “ the way of “Non-Being” or even the false. Parmenides himself actually suggests a third path, which tries to walk both “is” and “is not” at the same time — a path of contradiction.
Understanding any of Parmenides’ paths is not easy, but the path of “is not” is especially vexing. The problem, as it has come down through the history of philosophy, and particularly the history of logic, is to understand the standing of what “is not”. When we say that the sky is not green, is there a fact in the world that we are pointing to, by which what we are saying is true, as there seems to be when we say the sky is blue? In the absence of such a fact, of the existence of what isn’t, in other words, what is it that we are saying when we say that something isn’t the case?
Even the path of “is” is troubling. Setting aside for the moment Parmenides’ own arguments about the indivisibility of Being and the paradoxes of change that motivated the later Eleatic philosophers (famously, Zeno), what does it mean to say that something “is”? Is it a reference to a fact about the world, is it rather essentially an assertion by an implicit speaker, . . . . ?
Those questions are at the root of logic, where logic is understood as the (prescriptive) structure of rational thought. And they are the problems that Kimhi is trying to solve here.
He takes us through their history, beginning with Parmenides’ poem, through analyses of Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Frege’s theories of logic, along with critical questions from Wittgenstein. In each, he finds clues taking him forward to what he ultimately believes to be a correct analysis of the roles of predication, propositions, negation, and intensional contexts in formal logic and the analysis of assertion.
I’m hardly sufficiently versed in either the philosophy or history of logic to make a confident assessment of Kimhi’s argument and claims.
His solution rests on a distinction between categorematic expressions and syncategorematic expressions. In the simplest of terms, a categorematic expression is one that can occur as a component of a proposition (S is p), either as its subject or predicate. The proposition will have a truth value based on the relationship of its categorematic components. A syncategorematic expression is one that cannot occur as a component of a proposition, as its subject or predicate.
Kimhi argues that negation and intensional expressions are syncategorematic, as are propositions themselves considered as unities. Thus the proposition p, and its truth value, occurring in:
(1) p
(2) ~p
(3) A thinks that p
are the same. The differences among the three — the proposition, the negated proposition, and the proposition in an intensional context — are syncategorematic.
And he claims that his analysis will render p and ~p as themselves a unity — an assertion of ~p asserts no other proposition than an assertion of p does. Both assertions are operations on a single proposition p. Kimhi believes that the problem posed in Parmendes’ poem, “thinking what is not”, is resolved through his analysis of categorematic and syncategorematic expressions.
No doubt I haven’t done Kimhi’s work justice, and I’ve probably misstated points. As I said, I’m not a logician or an historian of logic. I’ll be very interested to see what readers who are better equipped to assess his work have to say.
Needless to say, this is a very dense, technical work, best read patiently, and optimally, with a good grounding in the history of the philosophy of logic.
The two paths are also called “the way of Truth” and “ the way of “Non-Being” or even the false. Parmenides himself actually suggests a third path, which tries to walk both “is” and “is not” at the same time — a path of contradiction.
Understanding any of Parmenides’ paths is not easy, but the path of “is not” is especially vexing. The problem, as it has come down through the history of philosophy, and particularly the history of logic, is to understand the standing of what “is not”. When we say that the sky is not green, is there a fact in the world that we are pointing to, by which what we are saying is true, as there seems to be when we say the sky is blue? In the absence of such a fact, of the existence of what isn’t, in other words, what is it that we are saying when we say that something isn’t the case?
Even the path of “is” is troubling. Setting aside for the moment Parmenides’ own arguments about the indivisibility of Being and the paradoxes of change that motivated the later Eleatic philosophers (famously, Zeno), what does it mean to say that something “is”? Is it a reference to a fact about the world, is it rather essentially an assertion by an implicit speaker, . . . . ?
Those questions are at the root of logic, where logic is understood as the (prescriptive) structure of rational thought. And they are the problems that Kimhi is trying to solve here.
He takes us through their history, beginning with Parmenides’ poem, through analyses of Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Frege’s theories of logic, along with critical questions from Wittgenstein. In each, he finds clues taking him forward to what he ultimately believes to be a correct analysis of the roles of predication, propositions, negation, and intensional contexts in formal logic and the analysis of assertion.
I’m hardly sufficiently versed in either the philosophy or history of logic to make a confident assessment of Kimhi’s argument and claims.
His solution rests on a distinction between categorematic expressions and syncategorematic expressions. In the simplest of terms, a categorematic expression is one that can occur as a component of a proposition (S is p), either as its subject or predicate. The proposition will have a truth value based on the relationship of its categorematic components. A syncategorematic expression is one that cannot occur as a component of a proposition, as its subject or predicate.
Kimhi argues that negation and intensional expressions are syncategorematic, as are propositions themselves considered as unities. Thus the proposition p, and its truth value, occurring in:
(1) p
(2) ~p
(3) A thinks that p
are the same. The differences among the three — the proposition, the negated proposition, and the proposition in an intensional context — are syncategorematic.
And he claims that his analysis will render p and ~p as themselves a unity — an assertion of ~p asserts no other proposition than an assertion of p does. Both assertions are operations on a single proposition p. Kimhi believes that the problem posed in Parmendes’ poem, “thinking what is not”, is resolved through his analysis of categorematic and syncategorematic expressions.
No doubt I haven’t done Kimhi’s work justice, and I’ve probably misstated points. As I said, I’m not a logician or an historian of logic. I’ll be very interested to see what readers who are better equipped to assess his work have to say.
Needless to say, this is a very dense, technical work, best read patiently, and optimally, with a good grounding in the history of the philosophy of logic.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews