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.

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.