My paper offers a brief overview of three general subfields that I have tried to implement in my personal research and in the context of a number of collective projects with various colleagues: ‘Homo Logicus’ (2016-2023); ‘Social History of Logic in the Middle Ages’ (2018), ‘The Europe of Logic’ (2017-2020); ‘Pluralising Logic’ (2024-2028). These are: 1. A social history of logic 2. An intercultural and a connected history of logic; 3. An interdisciplinary study of logic throughout history (up to the present). All three have a philosophical dimension, since they are conceived here as primarily intended to reveal the impact that these different contexts can have on the concept of logic. The latter is identified according to the way logic was theorized and practised by the actors and/or reconstructed by the historians, in an attempt to fully pluralize and historicize the very concept of logic.

All three are also closely related. The social history of logic, as I understand it, is indeed the key that opens intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches. It can be seen as a complement to earlier studies in the history of histories of philosophy (Piaia, Park, König-Pralong), which have exposed the way in which philosophy has been exclusively appropriated by European thinkers since the end of 18th century to the detriment of non-Western intellectual traditions, often along racist parameters. It reveals how logic as a discipline and a skill became a central aspect of European culture and education and endowed with an anthropological dimension not from the beginning (from Greek antiquity) but only from the Middle Ages. This happened when the university and a European network religious schools teaching secular sciences (logic, grammar, philosophy) were born (13th century), along a series of contingent factors precisely located in time and space. 

The empire of logic was also greatly expanded. The discipline of logic was already much larger than what is now called ‘logic’, since it included at least a theory of argumentation and fallacy, an epistemology, a methodology of science and a philosophy of language, while the rules of logic were for the first time rigidly applied in everyday academic practice (commentaries and disputations). It was also used as a basic knowledge and skill in theology, law and medicine, diffused in lay culture (literature) and projected onto a range of objects that became newly ‘logical’: God’s mind and knowledge, the language of the Bible, natural realities in their relationships, the human mind, visual perception, imagination, animal and human agency — some of which displayed ‘implicit’ or ‘unnoticed’ ‘syllogisms’ and captured by the concept of ‘natural logic’ (logica naturalis). 

It is this rich content of what I propose to call the ‘Ancient Model of Logic’, which remained dominant until the 19th century, that allows us to better welcome and understand a diversity of logical theories and practices in different cultures, whether or not the latter have traditionally developed a learned tradition of logical theory: Indian (Buddhist, Islamic, Vedic, etc.), Chinese (ancient and contemporary), African (developed by African logicians in recent decades), American (as identified in Native American philosophy), or even ‘primitive’, as discussed by sociologists and anthropologists in the wake of Lévy-Bruhl’s (1910) idea of a ‘prelogical mentality’, such as the idea of  a ‘Zande logic’. The study of the Ancient Model of Logic sheds light on the role played by logical argumentation in various disciplines, beginning with legal logic (born in the Middle Ages), but also on the way in which the objects of some fields emerged in the modern period, such as experimental psychology and cognitive science (as focused on ‘inferences’) were originally defined as logical in essence. Within logic studies, it helps to understand the interdisciplinary nature of some debates, such as the notion of a ‘natural logic’ (in the modern sense), a ‘naturalized logic’ (John Woods), or a ‘proto-logic’ (recently Bermúdez; Hanna) that we might (or might not) share with other animals. It also provides historical and philosophical tools for thinking about postcolonial and feminist criticisms of logic.