Logic and Feminism

Sara Ayhan (Ruhr University Bochum)
Title: Feminist logic(s): Potentials, challenges and the case of contradictions
Abstract: Work in the field of feminist logic is still rather scarce and the field itself remains a contested area of study, but still, it is developing. One approach concentrates on analyzing logical systems with respect to structural features that may perpetuate sexism and oppression or, on the other hand, features that may be helpful for resisting and opposing these social phenomena. Upon this assumption, I want to investigate possible applications of queer feminist views on (philosophy of) logic with respect to a very specifi c group, namely contradictory logics, i.e., logical systems containing contradictions in their set of theorems. I want to show that, on the one hand, the formal set-up of contradictory logics makes them well-suited from the perspectives of feminist logic and, on the other hand, that queer feminist theories provide a relevant, and so far undeveloped, conceptual motivation for contradictory logics. Thus, applying contradictory logics to reasoning about queer feminist issues may prove fruitful both as a 'real-life' motivation for these rather marginalized logical systems and as a formal basis for a philosophical fi eld that is still characterized by a distrust of formalism.

Sara Uckelman (Durham University) (Zoom)
Title: Logic as Liberation, or, Logic, Feminism, and Being a Feminist in Logic
Abstract: There has been a long history of tension between feminists and feminist philosophy, on the one hand, and logic, on the other hand. This tension expresses itself in many ways, including claims that logic is a tool of the patriarchy, that logic/rationality/analytical tools in philosophy need to be rejected if women are to fully participate, that women = body and man = mind, that to do feminist philosophy one must do it as a situated, embodied person, not as an impersonal, disembodied mind, that logic is “a masculine subject”. However the tension is expressed, it is women in logic and women logicians who are caught in between. The goal of my paper is to explore a conception of logic that not only is not inconsistent with being a feminist, but is actively welcoming of women as logicians.

Roy T. Cook
Title: Queering Consequence: A Framework for Liberatory Logics
Abstract: In this talk we will build on the account of "genderqueer" developed by Robin Dembroff, formulating a conception of what it is for a conception of gender to be a logically critical gender kind  (i.e., the kind of gender conception that could provide challenges to classical logic). This in turn provides us with a precise account of what it is for a logic to be genuinely feminist (insofar as a non-classical feminist logic must be motivated by challenges to traditional, binary gender norms). We will conclude by surveying a number of attempts in the literature to defend a particular logic as "feminist", and show that many (but, importantly, not all!) of these logics fail to be genuinely feminist on purely technical grounds.

Franci Mangraviti (they) (University of Padova) 
Title: Demystifying feminist logic
Abstract: The recent resurgence of so-called feminist logic has brought with it a new iteration of decades-old debates on whether such a thing is even possible. In this talk I show that, once we shift the focus from logical and philosophical theories to logical and philosophical practices, questions about possibility are not a danger to the standing of feminist logic, any more than to the standing of feminist philosophy and logic qua separate disciplines.

First, I argue that logicians' principled objections to feminist logic routinely ignore existing answers from other corners of logic, e.g. when it comes to worries about pluralism or revising logical truths. Qua logician, the feminist logician is entitled to those answers.

Second, I argue that acknowledging harmful or oppressive dominant practices suffices to create room for feminist logic, insofar as logic can serve as a tool for making space within dominant practices, a foil when rebelling against dominating practices, or a dimension to tweak in pursuit of radically new practices. Qua feminist, the feminist logician is entitled to that acknowledgment. 

The upshot is that many varieties of contemporary feminist logic are not only continuous with other logical practices, but can be fruitfully understood as logical criticalities - instances of correction, resistance, or revolution - relative to some harmful dominant practice. This conception of feminist logic neither requires nor prevents a radical approach: like any criticality, feminist logic comes in all kinds of shades.

Lukas Skiba
Title: Stebbing on Relations
Abstract: While recent years have seen an increase of interest in Susan Stebbing’s contributions to early analytic philosophy, her work on the metaphysics of relations—presented to the Aristotelian Society in 1917—has so far received almost no attention. This is surprising because the nature of relations was one of the central battlegrounds in the early analytic revolt against British idealism and, as a result, one of the most important topics at that time. The neglect might be partly explained by the many interpretational challenges one faces when reading the text today. Explicable or not, I argue that it is undeserved. After identifying several interpretational puzzles, I suggest that they can be solved by ascribing to Stebbing a conception of relations somewhat similar (in different respects) to those held by Frege and (early) Wittgenstein. Thus understood, Stebbing’s conception of relations will side with early analytic philosophers, rather than British idealists, on all major lines of divisions.

Sara Ayhan is a logician with a background in philosophy interested in – among others – the following topics: non-classical logics, feminist logic, paradoxes, proof-theoretic semantics, bilateralist proof theory, identity and synonymy of proofs. She did her PhD on the topic "Meaning and identity of proofs in (bilateralist) proof-theoretic semantics" under the supervision of Heinrich Wansing and Greg Restall. Since May 2023 she is a Post-Doc in the ERC Advanced Grant Project Contradictory Logics - A Radical Challenge to Logical Orthodoxy at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

Dr. Sara L. Uckelman is an associate professor of logic at Durham University. She received her PhD from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam in 2009, with a dissertation entitled Modalities in Medieval Logic. After completing her PhD, she held research positions in Amsterdam, Tilburg, and Heidelberg before coming to Durham in 2014. Dr. Uckelman is a specialist in modal logic and the history of logic, especially logic in the Middle Ages.

Roy T Cook is CLA Scholar of the College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. He has published over one hundred articles and book chapters on the philosophy of mathematics, philosophical and mathematical logic (including feminist logic), and the aesthetics of popular culture (especially comics). He is the author of The Dictionary of Philosophical Logic (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Paradoxes (Polity, 2013), and The Yablo Paradox (Oxford University Press, 2014), and is co-editor (with Audrey Yap) of the Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science volume titled Feminist Philosophy and Formal Logic (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

Franci Mangraviti is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Padova. They began their academic career in mathematics, before turning to logic and finally to philosophy. Their PhD dissertation analysed the field of inconsistent mathematics from a practice-based perspective, culminating in a reconceptualization of the field as a liberatory activity. Their primary research interests are alternative logics and mathematics, and interactions of logic and maths with feminist and trans philosophy.Franci Mangraviti's personal website. 

Lukas Skiba is an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen. Before joining Bergen, he was an Assistant Professor Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the University of Hamburg. He did his PhD and MPhil at the University of Cambridge after obtaining a BA from Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Lukas' philosophical interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics with the philosophy of logic and language. He's also interested in the history of analytic philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Gottlob Frege and Susan Stebbing. Webpage.