ABSTRACT
Histories of logic, heroic narratives of victory, breakthrough, defeat, reverse, that show logic moving steadily, if fitfully, toward perfection, were of little help. The problems of logic, historians of logic seemed to insist, are logic’s own; they are unrelated to conflictual relations between men and women, between men, or between men and the natural world, unrelated, that is, to all that might have made them understandable. A logician might be a dogmatist in religion, a fascist in politics, a sadist in love, the histories would not mention it. Marital conflict, poverty, war might keep the logician from his desk, but once there, he puts family disputes, politics, and economic hardship aside and engages in a purely intellectual activity. Logic is the creation of defensive male subjects who have lost touch with their lived experience and define all being in rigid oppositional categories modelled on a primal contrast between male and female.
