Jean-Yves Beziau

Jean-Yves Beziau (JYB) is a Swiss Logician, Philosopher and Mathematician, PhD in mathematics and PhD in Philosophy. He has been living and working in different places: France, Brazil, Poland, Corsica, California (UCLA, Stanford, UCSD), Switzerland. He is currently Professor at the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, former Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Philosophy and former President of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy.

Before focusing on logic, he did a Master's thesis in philosophy at the Sorbonne under the supervision of Sarah Kofman on Plato's Cave. He is interested in the ti esti inquiry, having written a series of papers "What is X?", the latest two being What is money?, What is a diagram?, and has presented a lecture on the ti esti itself at the 25th World Congress of Philosophy in Rome in 2024. He is currenrly organizing the congress What Is It? That’s the Question! to be held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2026.

JYB is the creator of the World Logic Day, yearly celebrated on January 14 (UNESCO international days), the World Logic Prizes Contest, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the book series Logic PhDs and the logic area editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

JYB is the originator of Universal Logic as a general theory of logical structures, and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Logica Universalis and book series Studies in Universal Logic, both published by Birkhäuser/Springer, Basel. He has recently launched the Logica Universalis Webinar and is the current president of LUA and is organizing a series of events on universal logic around the world: UNILOG - World Congress and School on Universal Logic (Montreux 2005, Xi'an 2007, Lisbon 2010, Rio de Janeiro, 2013, Istanbul 2015, Vichy 2018, Crete 2022, Peru 2025).

JYB has made important contributions in paraconsistent logic (former student of Newton da Costa, JYB is editor of the Paraconsistent Newsletter and organizer of the 3rd, 5th and 6th World Congress on Paraconsistency). JYB has shown in particular that the modal logic S5 is a paraconsistent logic and that the nameless corner of the square of opposition is a paraconsistent negation. JYB has revived the study of the square of opposition organizing interdisciplinary world events on this topic SQUARE (Montreux 2007, Corsica 2010, Beirut 2012, Vatican 2014, Easter Island 2016, Crete 2018, Leuven 2022, Costa Rica 2024) and organizing the publication of special issues of journals and books on the subject.

JYB is working at promoting logic in South America. He has launched in 2015 together with Marcelo Coniglio the South American Journal of Logic and has organized together with Luis Felipe Bartolo Alegre SALOME 1 - the 1st South American LOgic MEeting in Cusco, Peru, January 2024.

JYB has also been working on imagination, symbolism and semiotics. He has systematically used images to write philosophical papers in a series of IMAGINARY PAPERS and organizing a big international event on imagination in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, L'IMAGINATION. As the President of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, JYB also has organized in the marvelous city the event CREATIVITY'2019. In Geneva, JYB organized the workshop ARBITRARINESS OF THE SIGN part of Saussure CLG Centenary.

With Ricardo Silvestre, JYB has launched the series of events WoCoLoR - World Congress on Logic and Religion and created the association LARA which is organizing a webinar on the topic.

JYB is a member of the editorial board of various journals including Philosophies (MPDI), Logics (MPDI), Frontiers in Psychology (Frontiers Media) and the Journal of Logic and Computation (Oxford University Press).