Hegel, Analytical Philosophy, and Formal Logic

We are happy to issue a Call for Papers on Hegel, Analytical
Philosophy, and Formal Logic. Paul Redding (University of Sydney) and
Clark Butler (Purdue University, Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne Campus) will
coordinate this conference on the Fort Wayne Campus, Fort Wayne Indiana
26805 USA, Friday and Saturday, October 24-25, 2014.

Invited speakers include Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh) Ermanno
Bencivenga (UC-Irvine),Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY Graduate Center), and Graham
Pries (CUNY Graduate Center). The coordinators will also partake.

Formal logic will be understood as post-Aristotelean logic up to the
present. In recent years certain philosophers, Hegel scholars, neo-
Hegelians, and analytic philosophers have begun to increasingly
communicate. Yet some who know Hegel find his criticism of "formal logic"
as justification not reopening the question. Others in the analytic
tradition, especially logicians, plead ignorance of Hegel, making them
incapable of judging whether any formal logical treatment helps us
understand the historical Hegel.

Sample questions to be addressed by presenters are: “Would Hegel, if
alive today, see more merit in contemporary formal logic than in
Aristotelian logic?” “Can non-standard types of formal logic help clarify
Hegel, or is the cause of making Hegel clearer better served by using
standard formal logic—the formal logic known to mainstream philosophers
generally having taken an advanced undergraduate course and perhaps one or
even several more advanced graduate courses?” “Can the traditional view of
many Hegel scholars that contentless formal logic is useless in making
Hegel clear be rethought through formal logics other than the one
understood either by Hegel or by writers of standard symbolic
textbooks” “Can Hegel be understood better by developing the contrast
between dialectical logic and formal logic beyond the point he left it, or
is dialectical logic assimilable to a formal logic capable of expressing
REASON rather than merely the UNDERSTANDING?”

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