Logic Or Rational Thoughts On The Powers Of The Human Understanding With Their Use And Application In The Knowledge And Search Of Truth

Logic, Or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding

Maimon's Essay on a New Logic Or Theory of Thinking

The Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking, originally published in Berlin in 1794, was Salomon Maimon's hard-won success after a lifetime's pursuit of philosophical wisdom, Timothy Franz presents its first English translation. Franz translates the entirety of the New Logic, Maimon's Letters to Aenesidemus, two hostile reviews he vigorously annotated, and his letters to Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte about the work. Franz prefaces the text with a new history of Maimon's unique philosophical development, an introduction that discusses Maimon's relation to Kant, and a commentary that reconciles Maimon's idiosyncratically disjointed style with his unified vision of a systematic philosophy of reflection. This makes Maimon's work available for further study.

Kant and the Science of Logic

Immanuel Kant's enduring influence on philosophy is indisputable. In particular, Kant transformed debates on the fundamental questions in logic, and it is the significance and complexity of this accomplishment that Huaping Lu-Adler here explores. Kant's theory of logic represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions: Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? Kant's official answer to these questions centers on three distinctions: general versus particular logic; pure versus applied logic; pure general logic versus transcendental logic. The true meaning and significance of each distinction becomes clear, Lu-Adler argues, only if we consider two factors. First, Kant was mindful of various historical views on how logic relates to other branches of philosophy and to the workings of common human understanding. Second, he invented "transcendental logic" while struggling to secure metaphysics as a proper "science," and this conceptual innovation in turn held profound implications for his mature theory of logic. Against this backdrop, Lu-Adler reassesses the place of Kant's theory in the history of philosophy of logic and highlights certain issues that are debated today, including normativity of logic and the challenges posed by logical pluralism. Kant and the Science of Logic is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant's theory of logic from a historical perspective. It is a vital contribution to the study of Kantian logic.