Jeremy Heis colloquium

“Did Kant believe that formal logic is analytic?”

It is now universally held that, for Kant, formal logic is analytic. In this talk, I consider the possibility that, once the question “Is formal logic analytic?” has been clarified and disambiguated in a way that Kant would recognize, the answer may be “No” for some parts of formal logic. To make this claim, I look at Kant’s philosophical and logical writings, both published and in lectures. Just as importantly, I also look at the half century of German logicians who self-consciously followed Kant and addressed the relationship between analyticity and logic. I’ll show that, not only did Kant never explicitly claim that all of formal logic is analytic, but the claim that logic is analytic is virtually absent among Kant’s students and the self-styled Kantian logicians that followed him. I consider the possibility that there are important philosophical reasons preventing Kant and Kantians from claiming that all of formal logic is analytic.