About the Project
Almost every discipline within philosophy has its own established feminist version. Thus we can talk about “feminist epistemology”, “feminist metaphysics”, “feminist philosophy of language”, etc. The exception to this rule is – logic. Its feminist analysis is much less often mentioned as a separate field of research.
The “feminist logic” project was founded by Val Plumwood (1993), who argued that logic, albeit a formal discipline, is subject to feminist analysis, criticism, and reform. She thereby responds to the feminist logical abolitionism proposed by Andrea Nye (1990), who claimed that formal logic is by its very nature opposed to feminist goals. In the last few years there has been a surge of interest in feminist philosophy of logic (see, for example, Cook 2023; Eckert and Donahue 2020; Ferguson 2023; Mangraviti 2023a, 2023b; Restović 2023; Russell 2020, 2024; Saint-Croix and Cook 2024). The research project Feminist Philosophy of Formal Logic wants to join this positive trend.
The project has two research aspects: i) the feminist philosophy of formal logical systems and models in the narrower sense, and ii) a broader critique of the hegemonic understanding of reason, given that logic is conceived as the image and paradigm of rationality.
Within its first aspect, the project explores the possibility, justification, and scope of a feminist critique of formal logic, and subsequently, the potential reform or abolition of logic. Following Plumwood’s example, it advocates for the possibility of a “feminist logic” (or “feminist logics”), while also taking into account the pressing counterarguments raised by Nye (such as the inherent abstractness of logic and its possible inapplicability to lived experience). The project also examines to what extent the existence of feminist logical systems requires a departure from the standard conception of logic as an a priori discipline concerned exclusively with the form rather than the content of statements, and whether approaches from the broader field of feminist philosophy of science can be applied to the feminist philosophy of logic, in which case feminist logic could be a logic guided by feminist values and/or one that arises from feminist perspectives.
Within its second aspect, the project investigates broader issues related to the concept of reason in light of the recent advancements in fundamental theory of knowledge following the developments in critical, non-ideal, deeply social and systems-oriented epistemology, in particular with regards to the pluralist demands of this renewed fundamental theory of knowledge (see for instance Anderson 2006, D’Agostino 2006, 2010, Weisberg and Muldoon 2009, Gaus 2016, Smart 2018, Levy and Alfano 2020, Nguyen 2022, McKenna 2023, Müller 2023). Namely, building on the normative pragmatist (Brandom 1998) and the interactionist (Mercier and Sperber 2019) theory of reason as social deliberation, project aims to analyze and evaluate key criticisms of reason’s epistemic reliability and inquire about the possibility of reconceptualizing certain fundamental aspects of reason in order to develop an epistemological theory that accounts for epistemic functions of reason, and its relation to epistemic reliability, under the conditions of non-ideal, deeply social, systems-oriented epistemology. Moreover, it aims to analyze and situate (in terms of epistemic functions) some key epistemological concepts – the notion of norms of reliable deliberation, the notion of competence, the varieties of situated knowledge and the notion of unreasonableness – within the theory of reason and, more broadly, in relation to epistemic reliability, under the conditions of non-ideal, deeply social, system-oriented epistemology. Finally, it aims to inquire about the features of a social system that allows for an epistemically reliable use of reason.
Research project Feminist philosophy of formal logic (acronym: FFFL) is conducted at the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb in the period 2024–2027, reviewed by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia and financed through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.