The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics (

Could there be a logical alien? The upshot of Jim Conant’s way of dealing with this question is that it should be answered neither in the affirmative nor in the negative. Imagining a logical alien is not to imagine something impossible; the problem is that those who have toyed with the idea have not made it clear what they are trying to imagine. The key idea in the so-called resolute reading of the Tractatus, of which Conant is a central advocate, is consequently that the Tractarian ladder is really thrown away: when the book has come to its end, no positive or negative conclusions are drawn, but the ladder has indeed been therapeutically instrumental in helping readers to get out of the impasse in which they were stuck. This means that the notion of a logical alien, suitably defined, might after all be used. At one point in The Logical Alien (p. 321), Conant says that he himself can be described as a “logical alien,” in the sense of being a philosopher with a conception of logic that strikes most contemporary philosophers as alien. Moreover, this book itself might make one inclined to describe Conant as a logical alien in another sense of the word. For what is most remarkable, unusual, indeed alien about this book is not so such much its contents as its form. The idea behind the book is a very fruitful one: start with Conant’s 1991 paper “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” have eight philosophers comment on the paper, and end with Conant’s reply to his critics. When the section of comments ends on p. 292, the book has at times been very interesting, sometimes not so interesting, but not strange, although the difficulty of holding it in one’s hands is indicative of what is to come: we still have almost 800 pages to go. Would anyone else than a logical alien reply to his critics at such