At. A recent meeting of the buenos Aires Logic Group in Argentina, Sara Uckelman, from Durham University in the UK, gave a very interesting talk on the importance of the history of logic. For starters, by “the history of logic”, she did not mean (just) who proved what or who developed which technique, etc. Instead, she meant the history of logic as a field, i.e., asking questions about why logic even exists as a discipline and how it developed to become the sort of academic discipline it currently is. Who even thought about logic as something tat could and ought to be studied and, even more importantly perhaps, taught? and by whom? and to whom? 

Image description: Sara Uckelman, a white woman standing in profile, with straight white and light brown hair in a ponytail, wearing glasses, dressed in dark colors, except for a pashmina in bright purple and earth tones, a ring on each of her hands, giving her talk in front of a whiteboard, at the main conference room of the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico in Buenos Aires, Argentina

According to the story Uckelman sketched this week, logic was born out of the need of sharpening reasoning and argumentation skills for public deliberation. This meant that it ought to be taught only to those who would participate in such debates, i.e. free men. Later, as it became understood more and more as a general science of reason, it was introduced into the “new world” as part of the colonizing and evangelizing project of christian Europe. Thus, Americans were taught “how to reason properly” by Europeans. That is why logic became so central in New Spain and remains so important in, for example, México.

Finally, as logic became more and more formal and mathematized, it became unsurprisingly more diverse and democratic. As I have argued before, formalization is one of the best means of fighting gatekeeping and building a more diverse field. This is an important lesson that all of philosophy ought to learn from logic.