The Logical Alien

Could there be ways of thinking that are foreign to us but perfectly at home for other thinkers? Is our own way of thinking just one among many, or is it, in its essentials, the form of thought as such? And do these questions make sense at all? Descartes, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, among many others, wrestled with them. Frege and later Wittgenstein considered the possibility of a logical alien: a thinker guided by a different logic who still counts as a thinker.

In 1991 the Chicago philosopher James Conant published a paper that brought this problem into sharp focus and set it clearly within its historical context. In 2011 a conference at the University of Porto in Portugal marked twenty years since its publication.

This volume collects Conant's original article together with responses to it from a group of distinguished philosophers: Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Arata Hamawaki, Martin Gustafsson, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant's replies follow. The discussion starts from the nature of logical truths, which was the main concern of the conference, and extends to the nature of thinkers and the nature of philosophy itself. Sofia Miguens is the editor.