Elena Ficara

The aim of this special issue is to explore the intersections of logic, intended as the formal science of valid consequence, and politics, the practical science of associated life. The analyses here provided deal with the theme in two ways: by considering what logic can do for politics, so proposing possible formalizations of political arguments, or using logical notions and tools to interpret political facts and problems; by considering what politics can do for logic, so examining how logical choices are and have been affected or determined by extra-logical facts of political relevance. The two perspectives outline a territory of inquiry that is not so much frequented, in political and logical literature, but is becoming more and more interesting nowadays.

The paper is about the connection between logic and discrimination, with special focus on Plumwood’s ideas in her groundbreaking article ‘The Politics of Reason. Towards a Feminist Logic’ (1993). Although Plumwood’s paper is not focused on the notion of discrimination, what she writes is useful for illuminating some basic mechanisms of thought that are at the basis of discriminatory practices. After an introductory section about the concepts of logic and discrimination and their possible interconnections, I present Plumwood’s ideas in 1993 with a special focus on their relevance for understanding the nature of discrimination. More specifically, I use examples of discriminatory practices that make the connection between logical operations and oppression envisaged by Plumwood clear. I focus especially on two questions: Can logic produce discrimination? Can logic contribute to the fight against discrimination? If so, how?

The paper is about the general project to read Heidegger “analytically” and “dialetheically”, which is at the core of Casati 2022. I argue that this project opens the question about the very possibility to ”unify” Heidegger with the modern logical tradition. After a short terminological clarification of the notions of traditional, modern, classical and non-classical logic, I briefly hint at Heidegger‘s critique of logic. I show that the development of Heidegger‘s thinking goes in a direction that is, irretrievably, antilogical. I conclude by assessing what this direction could mean for the overall project to read Heidegger from a non-classical logical, dialetheic point of view.

In this paper, I examine Hegel’s and Priest’s answers to three questions: “What is logic?” “Can logic be revised?” “If so, how is this done?” Considering that the two views are separated by more than 150 years in which logic has experienced its perhaps most radical revolution, the two accounts are surprisingly close. Both authors admit different meanings of “logic”. In both accounts what could be called a metaphysical concept of logic plays an important role. Moreover, both authors hold that logic as theory can be revised. Yet the two conceptions also differ in some relevant respect.

Suppose a person blushes iff what she says is false and she says: ‘I am blushing’. If she blushes, she doesn’t, and if she doesn’t, she does. This Blushing Liar (BL) is a new paradox, similar in some respects to the Pinocchio Paradox (PP): Pinocchio’s nose grows iff he says some falsity, and he says: ‘my nose is growing’. Both paradoxes involve physical properties, and both, supposedly, confirm the existence of metaphysical dialetheias (see Eldridge-Smith 2011). In the paper, we note first that while PP relies on the rather implausible scenario of a wooden puppet whose nose grows iff he is lying, so it is debunked by the objection of fictionality (raised by Beall 2012), BL is more plausible. Many people in our world blush, and it is not difficult to imagine someone whose saying is causally related to blushing in a similar way. A second question is whether blushing can be directly connected to falsity, without deliberate conscience, on the part of the speaker, of saying a false statement. So we explore the consequences of intending ‘I am blushing’ as a ‘lie’, in the strict meaning of the term, and we claim there is no substantial difference, but for the fact that the paradoxical effect is even more plausible. Third, we check whether BL and PP do really release metaphysical dialetheias, and we argue they do not: they lack the fundamental requisite of Liar-like contradictions, i.e. the stratification of properties.

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.

In this paper I argue that Hegel’s treatment of dialectical inferences, in particular of Plato’s dialectics in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, belongs to the history of the logical rule that, from Gerolamo Cardano to Bertrand Russell, is known as consequentia mirabilis. In 1906 Russell formalises it as follows: and its correspondent positive form as My paper has two parts. First, I show that dialectical inferences, for Hegel, involve sentences of the form and. Hegel, following Plato, stresses that these inferences are das Wunderbare, the marvellous element of dialectical reasoning. In this sense Hegel’s view belongs to the history of CM from a perspective that is both terminological and logical. Second, I stress the peculiarity of Hegel’s CM. In a classical setting, the conditional is admissible and from we can, by CM, derive, and from, by CM, infer. However, in Hegel’s analysis it is evident that we can neither infer from, nor from. Rather, in dialectical inferences what we can vali...

Giorgi Lebanidze's book is a welcome contribution to the literature on Hegel's logic and metaphysics. It provides a well-grounded account of the ontologico-metaphysical relevance of Hegel's thought, and locates it within a lucid reconstruction of recent debates. As the author argues in the introduction, two lines have dominated the English-speaking literature on Hegel in the last thirty years: an epistemological reading that brings Hegel close to Kant, and a metaphysical reading that decouples Hegel from Kant. Paradigmatic for the two readings are for Lebanidze Robert Pippin's groundbreaking Hegel's Idealism on the one side, and Robert Stern's Hegelian Metaphysics and Brady Bowman's Hegel and the...

My aim is to reconstruct the basic steps and the fundamental idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction of categories as well as Hegel’s interpretation and reframing of Kant’s idea. Hegel’s reading is crucial for two reasons: first, for fixing the basic form of the Kant­ian argument and secondly, for understanding its metaphilosophical relevance. For Hegel, philosophical proof has a specific nature, which distinguishes it from scientific proof and brings it closer to a juridical one. In this perspective the transcendental deduction, which is universally considered one of the most difficult chapters in the history of philosophy, reveals itself as the genuine clarification of specifically philosophical proof. I first present the idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as its Hegelian reading in the Science of Logic and reformulation as the very method of philosophy in the Philo­sophy of Right. I show what in the Kantian argumentation constituted the basis for Hegel’s own interpretation and transformation. In so doing, I highlight a ‘red thread’ between the two ideas of the transcendental deduction. I conclude by proposing a formal account of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas and by summing up the main metaphilosophical insights we can gain from Kant’s idea and its Hegelian interpretation.

The article is about the meaning of the word ‘transcendental’ in Kant and Fichte. Its aim is not merely exegetical. It is a common hermeneutical insight (now revitalised by research on conceptual engineering and conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy) that analysing the use and definitions of concepts in history, and their shifts in the development of the history of philosophy, is a crucial tool we have to understand those concepts and to assess their viability for philosophy today. In this paper, I focus on Kant’s use and definitions of the word ‘transcendental’ and suggest that they are symptomatic of a fundamental question that is not completely answered in Kant’s philosophy. If transcendental philosophy deals not with objects but rather the conditions of possibility of objective knowledge, then important questions emerge: What are these possibility conditions? Do they exist? Are they special objects? What is their nature? I show that the shift in Fichte’s use and understanding of the concept of ‘transcendental’ leads to a possible solution of the problem Kant was struggling with.

The paper proposes a dialectical reading of Abel’s Zeichen- und Interpretationsphilosophie, and more specifically of Abel’s theory of the forms of knowledge (Wissensformen) as developed in the third part of Zeichen der Wirklichkeit. After a short consideration of Hegel’s definitions of “dialectics” in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriß, I examine Abel’s theory of the forms of knowledge, showing its closeness to Hegel’s dialectical account of thought. Some paradigmatic insights are typical for both thinkers: the view of forms as generative principles rather than empty containers; the necessary link between ‘Wissensformen’ and natural language; the dynamic interplay between knowing (Wissen) and not-knowing (Nicht-Wissen); the dynamic nature of ‘Wissensformen’; the conception of a positive form of scepticism, which is an essential part of every form of philosophical knowledge (Wissen). In the last part, I examine those ideas that place Abel’s philosophy within contemporary neo-pragmatistic appropriations of Hegel. In my view, the strength of Abel’s position consists, in this respect, in its metaphilosophical awareness.

In 2023, Beall and Ficara present what they call Hegelian conjunctions. A Hegelian conjunction is a true conjunction of contradictory opposites in which the conjuncts, separately taken, are untrue and for which simplification fails. The analysis in Beall & Ficara History and Philosophy of Logic 44 (2) 119-131, 2023 is important for various reasons. First, for overcoming the deleterious state of estrangement between two ways of conceiving and practicing logic, the “dialectical” or “continental” and the “analytical” one. Second, for strengthening a new, promising way of conceiving conjunction in paraconsistency (d’Agostini Synthese 199, 6845 6874, 2021). Yet it needs an enlargement, mainly in two dimensions, a hermeneutical and a logical one. The former concerns the textual basis used by Beall and Ficara for motivating their account (the focus of their analysis is a small part of the early Hegelian fragment on Vereinigung – unification/conjunction). The latter is the semantics proposed by Beall and Ficara. In this paper, I focus on the first dimension, in the conviction that the condition for making the chief formal characteristics of dialectics (the logical dimension) clearer is a grasp of the Hegelian fragment in its entirety and complexity. The fragment is crucial for thinking about the logic, metaphysics and epistemology of true contradictions. Yet it counts as obscure. My aim is to make its content more accessible, and to present its relevance for conjunctive paraconsistency.