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.--.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Part I—The Bounds of Judgment
  • Introduction to Part I: Basic Necessities (or: The Shape of Thought)
  • The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus
  • What Descartes Ought to Have Thought about Modality
  • Kant on Logic and the Laws of the Understanding
  • Cartesian Skepticism, Kantian Skepticism, and Two Conceptions of Self-Consciousness
  • Logical Aliens and the “Ground” of Logical Necessity
  • Varieties of Alien Thought
  • Wittgenstein on Using Language and Playing Chess: The Breakdown of an Analogy and Its Consequences
  • Where Words Fail
  • Alien Meaning and Alienated Meaning
• Part II—The Logical Alien Revisited: Afterthoughts and Responses
  • Introduction to Part II: On How History of Philosophy Can Be Illuminating
• James Conant, Replies
  • Section I: Who Is the Author of These Afterthoughts and Responses?
  • Section II: A History of Philosophy That Challenges Contemporary Preconceptions?
  • Section III: Some Aspects of Conant’s Version of the History
  • Section IV: Theological Sources of Modern Conceptions of Logic
  • Section V: Leibnizian versus Kantian Conceptions of Logic
  • Section VI: A Resolute Reading of Descartes
  • Section VII: Reply to Moore: Descartes on the Relation of the Possible to the Actual
  • Section VIII: Reply to Boyle: Kant on the Relation of a Rational Capacity to Its Acts
  • Section IX: Reply to Hamawaki: On the Relation of Cartesian to Kantian Skepticism and the Relation of Consciousness to Self-Consciousness
  • Section X: Reply to Hamawaki and Stroud on Transcendental Arguments, Idealism, and the Kantian Solution of the Problem of Philosophy
  • Section XI: Reply to Stroud on Kant and Frege: On the Relation of Thought to Judgment
  • Section XII: Reply to Sullivan: Frege on the Priority of Logic to Everything
  • Section XIII: Reply to Gustafsson: Wittgenstein on the Relation of Sign to Symbol
  • Section XIV: Reply to Travis: Wittgenstein on the Non-Relation of Thinking to Being
  • Section XV: Reply to Benoist: Wittgenstein on the Relation of Language to Life
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects