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“For Frege, an account of what it is for a purely logical power to be in act suffices to allow us to achieve a proper philosophical appreciation of what “content,” “object,” “thought,” “judgment,” and “truth,” as such, are. These notions come to be fully in place through an elucidation of that power, considered apart from our capacity to arrive at kinds of knowledge that are not purely logical in content. Our capacity for empirical judgment, when it comes into view, will come into view as a comparatively complex joint exercise of a variety of faculties, in which the logically fundamental notions that figure in its explication (“content,” “object,” thought,” “judgment,” “truth”) are still supposed to retain the specific sense originally conferred upon them in our explication of the purely logical case, while allowing for their extension to logically impure cases of thought and proposition. A certain picture of the role of reflection on the purely logical case, inthe order of explication of kinds of knowledge, is at work here—a picture that has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of analytic philosophy. On this picture, only if we are armed with a prior account of the case of purely logical thought, supplementing it as we go along, can we come to understand what empirically contentful theoretical thought (or practical thought) is. On this picture, the spatiotemporal bearing and the self-consciousness of the thinking subject do not belong to the form of thought (and hence their treatment does not belong, as Kant held, to a suitably capacious conception of philosophical logic); rather, all such further details among various species of thought are to be subsequently specified, if at all, through the introduction of further indices figuring within the content of thought. (Thoughts are simply conceived of as occurring at a time or at a person.) These consequences of the Fregean picture are not, on the whole, something for which post-Fregean analytic philosophers argue. Rather, it involves an entire philosophical picture that is simply tacitly, and largely unwittingly, assumed—a picture that is already under attack, albeit in very different ways, in both Kant and early Wittgenstein. According to this post-Fregean picture, we can furnish an account of the wider reaches of our capacity for finite theoretical cognition only by assuming the prior intelligibility of some self- standing account of how one of the ingredient capacities in empirical cognition—the capacity for logical thought—off its own bat is able to yield a delimitable sphere of truth-evaluable, object-related thoughts with judgable content, without its yet having entered into any form of co- operation with our other cognitive capacities.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“On the Kantian conception logic as a whole is concerned with investigating the form of the understanding: that is, the form of the intellectual aspect of our overall cognitive faculty to represent objects. Pure general and transcendental logic, in turn, are each concerned with investigating a dimension of that form. On this conception, the source of logical form is not to be comprehended apart from the role of our capacity for thought in the achievement of forms of cognition that are not merely logical. And the source of the notion of mere form of which pure general logic treats is not to be comprehended apart from its internal relation to the full-blooded form of that unified general cognitive capacity - and hence to the forms of the understanding or the categories. This means that on a Kantian understanding of the order of explanatory priority, we must first comprehend the inner logical dimension of form of which transcendental logic treats if we wish to arrive at a proper appreciation of how, via an abstraction, we may arrive at a proper comprehension of the comparatively outer logical dimension of mere form of which pure logical treats - that dimension of form which the rationalist logician, in accordance with his logically thin conception of reason, takes to be self-standingly available.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“There is certainly something to the thought that certain classic papers of Putnam and Quine offer perhaps the closest thing to be found in twentieth-century philosophy to an attempt to rehabilitate Descartes's claim that it would be hubris for us to assert of an omnipotent God that He would be inexorably bound by the laws of logic - those laws which happen to bind our finite minds. In a move which is characteristic of much of contemporary naturalistic thought (both in and out of the academy), science is substituted for God. Cartesianism in the philosophy of logic, freed of its theological trappings, becomes the view that it would be hubris for us to assert of the ongoing activity of scientific inquiry that it will be forever bound by the laws of classical logic - those principles which happen to be most fundamental to our present conceptual scheme. The contrast is now no longer, as in Descartes, between the infinite powers of man and the infinite powers of God, but rather between the limits of present scientific thought and the infinite possibilities latent in the future of science as such ... If Descartes is led by a sense of theological piety to insist that God can do anything - no matter how inconceivably it may be to us - the contemporary ultra-empiricist is led by an equally fervent sense of naturalistic piety to insist that the science of the future might require a revision of any of our present axioms of thought - no matter how unacceptable such a revision might seem by our present lights. The exploration of the contours of possibility belongs to the business of the physicists. In this regard, we philosophers must issue them a blank check - it would compromise our standing as underlaborers to put a ceiling on how much they can spend. To paraphrase Descartes on God: we must not conclude that there is a positive limit to the power of science on the basis of the limits of our own (present) powers of conception. All of its hostility to theology notwithstanding, this contemporary form of piety is, in a sense, no less religious (in its unconditional deference to a higher authority) than Descartes's - it has simply exchanged one Godhead for another. But, unlike Descartes, precisely because it is overly hostile to theology, it is able easily to blind itself to the fact that it is a form of piety.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“Charles Kahn offers the following summary of how a new metaphysics takes shape in Islamic philosophy: 'My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation; that is to say, under the influence of biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God on the one hand, and that of the created world on the other.' The new metaphysics that takes shape in Islamic philosophy proves fateful for subsequent philosophy in various ways. What will interest us immediately below is how it plays a role in triggering a debate about how to conceive divine creation. What will be of implicit interest later in these replies is how a remarkably unvarnished version of this new metaphysics comes to be detached from its original theological context. The ensuing detheologized modal metaphysics remains in force in some quarters of analytic philosophy, even though it takes its point of departure from a topic (how to understand the act of divine creation) that is no longer of much interest to most analytic philosophers. For the new metaphysics introduces concepts and ways of thinking that, once divested of their theological garb, continually resurface in the history of philosophy up to the present day.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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