Pieter Seuren – Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: The Aristotelian Square of Opposition in Catholic Hands

It is described how three now almost forgotten mid-20th- century logicians, the American Paul Jacoby and the Frenchmen Augustin Sesmat and Robert Blanché, all three ardent Catholics, tried to restore traditional predicate logic to a position of respectability by expanding the classic Square of Opposition to a hexagon of logical relations, showing the logical and cognitive advantages of such an expansion. The nature of these advantages is discussed in the context of modern research regarding the relations between logic, language, and cognition. It is desirable to call attention to these attempts, as they are, though almost totally forgotten, highly relevant against the backdrop of the clash between modern and traditional logic. It is argued that this clash was and is unnecessary, as both forms of predicate logic are legitimate, each in its own right. The attempts by Jacoby, Sesmat, and Blanché are, moreover, of interest to the history of logic in a cultural context in that, in their own idiosyncratic ways, they fit into the general pattern of the Catholic cultural revival that took place roughly between the years 1840 and 1960. Guided by Jacques Maritain, the Catholic Church had put up stiff resistance to modern mathematical logic, considering it dehumanizing and a threat to Catholic doctrine. Both the wider cultural context and the specific implications for logic are described and analysed, in conjunction with the more general philosophical and doctrinal issues involved.

Sobre el autor

Pieter A.M. Seuren empezó su carrera en 1967, cuando asumióla cátedra de lingüística en la Universidad de Cambridge. En 1970 se mudó aOxford, donde nuevamente asumió la misma cátedra. En 1974 asumió el puesto deprofesor de filosofía del lenguaje en la Universidad Radboud de Nimega, PaísesBajos. En 1995 se trasladó a la Facultad de Letras en la misma universidad,donde asumió el profesorado de lingüística teórica. En 1988 fue elegido miembrode la Real Academia Neerlandesa de las Ciencias. Desde 1999 asumió la posiciónde investigador asociado en el Instituto Max Planck para la Psicolingüística enNimega. Ha sido maestro y mentor de grandes figuras de la lingüística moderna,entre los más conocidos se encuentran: Bernard Comrie, Stephen C. Levinson, AndrewRadford, Elena Lieven, Peter Hagoort, etc. Su lista de publicaciones comprendeaproximadamente 180 títulos, en su mayoría artículos. Entre estos se encuentrannueve libros importantes en lingüística teórica e historia de la lingüística:Operators and Nucleus (Cambridge University Press 1969), DiscourseSemantics(Blackwell 1985), Semantic Syntax (Blackwell 1996, Brill 2018),Western Linguistics (Blackwell 1998), Chomsky's Minimalism (Oxford UniversityPress [OUP] 2004), Language in Cognition (OUP 2009), The Logic of Language (OUP2010), From Whorf to Montague (OUP 2013) y el próximo a ser publicado Saussureand Sechehaye: Myth and Genius (Brill).