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The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
“A remarkable book capable of reshaping what one takes philosophy to be.”
―Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia
Could there be a logical alien―a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking ? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such?
From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien , edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers―Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account.
The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.
―Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia
Could there be a logical alien―a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking ? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such?
From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien , edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers―Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account.
The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.
- GenresPhilosophyLogic
1080 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 9, 2020
'In taking the full measure of just how profoundly some of these four philosophers' (Descartes, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein) respective ways of rejecting voluntarism, empiricism or psychologism about logic differ along some dimension from those of each of the others, we will begin to explore the third of the three ways in which the expression 'logical alien' - that figures in the title of this volume - may be understood to have a form of application to the discussions that follow. In doing so, we will discover how remarkably difficult it is in philosophy to remain faithful to the following maxim: Do not read the character of the logically primitive phenomenon off the model of its logically alienated counterpart!
We will see over and over again that his is what the contemporary philosopher is especially prone to do. Indeed, it is what each of us is prone to do when we first begin on attempting to understand the difficulties with which we will be concerned in the following pages, On this third way of deploying the expression 'logical alien,' a philosopher who suffers from logical alienation is one who mistakes a case that suffers from logical privation - a logically alienated case of consciousness, or of the exercise of a cognitive capacity, or form of human life - for the logically primitive form of the phenomenon under philosophical investigation.
On this third way of understanding who the logical alien is, the words in the title of this volume refer in the first instance neither to one of the great philosophers of the past for failing to be sufficiently contemporary in their mode of thought, nor to some strange being encountered in one of their thought experiments, but rather to the philosopher in each of us: in each reader of this volume who, when reflecting upon the conceptual landscape in which she is always already at home, becomes - through the effort to achieve philosophical understanding - a stranger to herself.'
We will see over and over again that his is what the contemporary philosopher is especially prone to do. Indeed, it is what each of us is prone to do when we first begin on attempting to understand the difficulties with which we will be concerned in the following pages, On this third way of deploying the expression 'logical alien,' a philosopher who suffers from logical alienation is one who mistakes a case that suffers from logical privation - a logically alienated case of consciousness, or of the exercise of a cognitive capacity, or form of human life - for the logically primitive form of the phenomenon under philosophical investigation.
On this third way of understanding who the logical alien is, the words in the title of this volume refer in the first instance neither to one of the great philosophers of the past for failing to be sufficiently contemporary in their mode of thought, nor to some strange being encountered in one of their thought experiments, but rather to the philosopher in each of us: in each reader of this volume who, when reflecting upon the conceptual landscape in which she is always already at home, becomes - through the effort to achieve philosophical understanding - a stranger to herself.'
February 22, 2022
This book is not only a long read but a dense one too. However, by the end, it is worth it. With fine detail, Conant and the many voices in this book bring high-resolution to the possibility of a Logical Alien.
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November 27, 2023This is the form of which philosophical progress should take.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews