Decolonizing “Natural Logic” / Logical Skills / LUWebinar Dec 15 - 4 pm CET

[jean-yves beziau]

This coming Wednesday, Dec 15,  in the Logica Universalis Webinar, we will have the presentation of the book

Logical Skills 

edited by Julie Brumberg-Chaumont & Claude Rosental

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-58446-7

published in the book series Studies in Universal Logic

https://www.springer.com/series/7391

and a talk based on one of the chapters of this book

Decolonizing “Natural Logic”

by  Scott L. Prat 

“Natural logic” was proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) as the engine of cultural evolution, concluding that the “course and manner” of cultural development “was predetermined, as well as restricted within narrow limits of divergence, by the natural logic of the human mind.” This essay argues that Morgan’s conception of natural logic aids the project of settler colonialism. Rather than being a false account of human agency, however, it is a conception of natural logic that is produced through the systematic narrowing of possibilities for agency, human, and otherwise. This narrowed logic is thus only a part of a differently conceived logic of agency that is also general (and so serves as the framework for all action) and normative (albeit with a set of norms different from those identified by Morgan). The discussion proceeds in four sections: first, a presentation of Morgan’s conception of natural logic and its origins; second, an analysis of four colonizing implications of Morgan’s view; third, examples of further developments of natural logic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the work structuralist and post-structuralist theorists; and, last, a brief introduction of a decolonial logic that provides a broader alternative conception of the structure of agency, human, and otherwise, and that avoids the oppressive effects of the reductionism of the natural logic received from Morgan and his successors.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-58446-7_2

Chair: Raffaela Giovganoli

https://philpeople.org/profiles/raffaela-giovagnoli

To attend this LUW session register here:

https://www.springer.com/journal/11787/updates/18988758

Jean-Yves Beziau

President of LUA - Logica Universalis Association

http://www.logica-universalis.org/LUAD