The logical alien

Are there forms of thought which are alien to us, but home to others? Is our form of thought just one among many? Or is it (in essentials) the form of thought per se? Are such questions even sensible? Descartes, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, among many, were exercised by such questions. Frege, and then Wittgenstein, discussed the possibility of a logical alien, a thinker whose thought is guided by a different logic yet still counts as a thinker. In 1991 Chicago philosopher James Conant published a paper which brought this issue into clear form and placed its illuminatingly into historical context. A 2011 Conference at the University of Porto - Portugal marked the twenty years of its publication. The present volume gathers the original article and the reflections on it by a number of distinguished philosophers (Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Arata Hamawaki, Martin Gustafsson, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan. and Charles Travis), followed by answers by Conant. The issues range from the nature of logical truths (the initial focus of Conference) to the nature of thinkers, and the nature of philosophy.--

Introduction to part I: basic necessities (or: the shape of thought) / Charles Travis and Sofia Miguens -- The search for logically alien thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus / James Conant -- What Descartes ought to have thought about modality / A. W. Moore -- Kant on logic and the laws of the understanding / Matthew Boyle -- Cartesian skepticism, Kantian skepticism, and two conceptions of self-consciousness / Arata Hamawaki -- Logical aliens and the "ground" of logical necessity / Barry Stroud -- Varieties of alien thought / Peter Sullivan -- Wittgenstein on using language and playin gchess: the breakdown of an analogy and its consequences / Martin Gustafsson -- Where words fail / Charles Travis -- Alien meaning and alienated meaning / Jocelyn Benoist -- Introduction to part II: on how history of philosophy can be illuminating / Sofia Miguens