Logica vivente. Studio sulla Logik di Christoph Sigwart

This study focuses on Christoph Sigwart’s (1830-1904) most ambitious philosophical work. It presents the idea of a logic of knowledge. This idea does not conform to the Kantian model insofar as it renounces the traditional attribution of universality and necessity to the a priori laws that define the transcendental conditions of knowledge. This results in both problems and advantages. First advantage: such a transcendental logic does not require a special epistemic status with respect to that of other empirical sciences. Second advantage: this logic, woven into the same contingency of these sciences, can provide a proper critique of their results. The main concern, instead, is but one: is this, in fact, still a transcendental logic? If a transcendental logic is supposed to provide us with the conditions for constituting the meaning of the reality of facts, how can its laws be contingent, that is, based on facts or consisting of relations between facts? The choice to explore these issues through Sigwart’s Logik (1st ed. 1873-1878; 2nd ed. 1889-1893; 3rd ed. 1904; 4th ed. 1911; 5th ed. 1924) is motivated by the belief that the cultural context of the work and the arguments discussed can help us get rid of some assumptions that became characteristic of the logics of knowledge during the last century. After a first section devoted to the presentation of the elements of interest and tension typical of the Kantian and empiricist tradition within which Sigwart inscribes his thought, the central sections of the study develop an analytical inquiry into the third edition of the Logik. This analysis follows Sigwart’s exposition in its linear and constructive tension but aims attention at some problematic cores: the judgment, the nature of epistemic justification, the relation between objectivity and truth, the relation between necessity and contingency, the concept, the structure of induction. In the fourth section, the fruits of this analysis are discussed in light of the features traditionally attributed to transcendental logic and the tasks that we could still assign to a critique of knowledge today. Thus, this study is also an introduction, however framed though a specific epistemological interest, to the main philosophical issues addressed by Sigwart and by the empiricist Kantian tradition Sigwart is a part of. The main result of this study is the sketch of a logic of knowledge that is coherent and effective in shedding some light on the meaning of knowledge and in providing tools for the critique of knowledge. A logic, however, that is grounded in contingent grounds: in the communitarian character of acts of knowledge, which makes them capable of constituting shared forms of life. This study argues that such a logic is possible, provided we rethink the connection between judgment and utterance and, more generally, between truth and its expression. This idea of logic, while not yet truly developed, is here proposed as an alternative to the dismissal of the project of a critique of knowledge from a transcendental perspective.