The Logical Alien

by Sofia Miguens (Contributor), James Ferguson Conant (Contributor), Jocelyn Benoist (Contributor)

Is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such? From Kant to Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question. This volume brings together nine distinguished thinkers on the subject, including James Conant, author of the seminal paper “The Search for Logically Alien Thought.”

Genres: Philosophy, Logic

1080 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Sofia Miguens é professora catedrática do Departamento de Filosofia da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, onde ensina, sobretudo, epistemologia, filosofia da mente, filosofia da linguagem e filosofia contemporânea. Foi Visiting Scholar na Universidade de Nova Iorque, no Institut Jean Nicod, na Universidade de Sydney e Professora Visitante na Universidade de Amiens. Foi Presidente da Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia.

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

'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.'

[Keane Neal-Riquier · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Kaidi Pan]

This is the form of which philosophical progress should take.