Ivan Restović

In her 1990 book, Andrea Nye famously called for the abolition of logic, citing feminist reasons. I offer a reinterpretation of her position in contemporary terms, as ‘tradition-rejection anti-exceptionalism’ about logic, i.e., a variant of logical anti-exceptionalism that puts into question the exceptional properties of logic, such as topic-neutrality and self-evidence. This move, I argue, makes Nye’s account more inviting. Further, I claim that most of Nye’s points are supported by insights from contemporary feminist research in metaphysics and epistemology. I thus propose that we adopt a feminist radical anti-exceptionalism about logic. Like Nye, we should direct our attention to the feminist critique of logic as a scientific/philosophical discipline, not just logic as a formal system. Tied to this, it is also important, I argue, that we don’t define feminist logic only in terms of “feminist topics”. Finally, I show that accounts of logic (mostly) in line with the proposed view can already be found in logical abductivist literature – so we needn’t abolish logic after all.

In this paper, I propose a logical model of mixed feelings. I claim that contrary emotions of desire, fear and indifference can be felt towards the same state of affairs and that this phenomenon can be modeled with the fuzzy logical hexagon. In the fuzzy logical hexagon, contrary notions are allowed to be true simultaneously, but with a special proviso: the sum of their values must be 100%. The same ratio, I claim, appears among the emotions of desire, fear and indifference when they are felt towards one and the same state of affairs. To calculate the percentage of an emotion in an ‘emotional ratio’, I propose an analysis of states in terms of their aspects, understood as relevant implications. For instance, a state can be both desired and feared if some of its relevant implications are desired and some feared. The present approach is in opposition to a non-realist stance in philosophy of affectivity about the possibility of simultaneous contrary emotions, where differentiation between aspects of a state is often used to explain away the possibility of mixed feelings. The proposed model also differs from some other graded formal approaches to desire and fear, which treat these two emotions separately, each according to its own logic. I claim that logic of desire and logic of fear is one and the same – that of the fuzzy logical hexagon.

According to Brouwer’s ‘theory of the exodus of consciousness’, our experience includes ‘egoicity’, a distinct kind of feeling. In this paper, we (i) describe his phenomenology in order to (ii) explore and elaborate on the notion of egoic sensations. In the world of perception formed from sensations, some of them are, Brouwer claims, not completely separated or ‘estranged’ from the subject, which is to say they have a certain degree of egoicity. We claim this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the primordial state of consciousness from where the ‘exodus’ starts. Having undertaken the analysis and interpretation of Brouwer’s descriptions and examples of egoic sensations, we (iii) provide a formal account of egoicity based on Brouwer’s definition of its relation to estrangement, desire and fear. We show that the four terms can be modeled by a classical and a graded logical hexagon, giving the corresponding axiomatizations.

The gender spectrum, a continuum ranging from “male” to “female,” is a huge improvement over the traditional binary model, according to which one can be either one or the other, and no degrees are allowed. However, the model still suffers from some inadequacies, most notably the inability to represent other genders and agender identities. This is accounted for in the new “spectral” models of gender, which use independent scales to measure the degree to which a person identifies with a given gender category. However, by conceiving the amounts on gender dimensions to be mutually independent, these models invite other difficulties, most notably the inability to account for agender identities in a straightforward fashion. In this paper, I argue that a way to solve the problems with the new models (and not to have the old problems re-appear) is to take a step back, of sorts, towards the initial gender spectrum. I explore from a perspective of philosophical logic the types of relations among gender categories in the spectral models of gender and argue that the initial spectrum construes gender categories to be in the logical opposition of “fuzzy contradiction,” while the models with more than one spectrum do not construe gender categories to be in any kind of logical opposition. I propose a weaker opposition (namely, “fuzzy contrariety”) between gender categories, as well as the “fuzzy gender hexagon”—an application of a particular abstract logical diagram to gender terms—as a model of gender identity.

According to Brouwer’s ‘theory of the exodus of consciousness’, our experience includes ‘egoicity’, a distinct kind of feeling. In this paper, we describe his phenomenology in order to explore and elaborate on the notion of egoic sensations. In the world of perception formed from sensations, some of them are, Brouwer claims, not completely separated or ‘estranged’ from the subject, which is to say they have a certain degree of egoicity. We claim this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the primordial state of consciousness from where the ‘exodus’ starts. Having undertaken the analysis and interpretation of Brouwer’s descriptions and examples of egoic sensations, we provide a formal account of egoicity based on Brouwer’s definition of its relation to estrangement, desire and fear. We show that the four terms can be modeled by a classical and a graded logical hexagon, giving the corresponding axiomatizations.

I this paper, I discuss Plumwood’s feminist logic program. I argue both in favor of her general stance in feminist philosophy of logic and her more specific feminist critique of classical logic. Plumwood’s general position is in opposition with (I think it’s safe to say) the prevailing view in analytic philosophy about the relation between formal logic and feminist theory, according to which feminist theory cannot say anything about or against logic proper, since the issues of oppression are external to logic as a (formal) discipline. Connected to this externalism is a non-Plumwoodian view that “feminist logic” either doesn’t mean anything, or that it has some figurative meaning. Concerning Plumwood’s (I think it’s safe to say) not widely accepted feminist critique of classical logic, I propose an interpretation according to which classical logic is oppressive only when it’s used to describe a particular, “dualized” or “dualizable”, kind of notions. In accordance with this understanding, I consider five features of oppressive differentiations as proposed by Plumwood, arguing that two of them don’t concern negation, the feminist critique of which operator Plumwood is mostly (in)famous for.