This book is by someone competent up to a point in logic. But that is all, and the point at which its incompetence is best revealed is the conclusion. Just before that, however, Nye tells us that Frege was insane. Then she reaches the stellar conclusion that logic is insane...her most famous thesis, it seems. It is bought through dramatics alone. The very thesis is a ... fallacy: it ascribes human pathos to inanimate or to abstract things. 'Logic is insane' is like saying that 'mathematics has a fireplace at home,' or that 'the pythagorean theorem was once a fish in a frying pan.' The other reviewer here constantly personifies abstractions, like Derrida and Nye. Right near the start of her very short concluding chapter, Nye admits that she has employed ad hominem and genetic fallacies. She then tries to justify their use. Do not read the book until you fully understand her argument there. This book is a museum piece. It is a tour of the gernre of the contracted book, in which the author promised to bring particular prejudices to bear on things that withstand all prejudice. There just is nothing feminist to say about logic, only about logicians and other actually political things. There is nothing feminism can do about the primeness of three and the non-primeness of four. Their moral and political categories are not suited for the assessment of abstractions like the primeness of three. On the last page before the conclusion chapter, Nye admits that she is not a logician. She meant to say, not much of one.

As a part-time, occasional university teacher and full time software developer who has taught logic, I found Ms Nye's work very useful in livening up my classes. It is a shame that it does not seem to be available.

Nye's thesis: the actual praxis of logic has been a struggle for power between men and not a disinterested search for truth. It will be said by many philosophers that she is doing history...not logic.

However, a reading of Indian indicates to me two interesting facts. The first is that only in the western tradition do philosophers suppose that logic can be studied out of context. Indian logicians appear to emphasise the importance of context: in their tradition (according to my limited understanding) you do not introduce the axiom "when there's smoke, there's fire" without illustrating its context as in "when there's smoke, there's fire, as in the kitchen."

In the western tradition, this is marginalia. This is probably why logic seems so dry and so difficult and why its anhedonic (anti-pleasure) nature instills an unacknowledged anger in its mostly male followers...an anger which Ms Nye shows resulted in debates that were more struggles for power than searches for truth, and which also result in Internet "flame" wars and the obscenities of modern American politics.

Ms Nye recommends in place of logic training in reading and in listening. I used her suggestions in a recent class in a working-class university, to I hope positive effect.

The traditional philosophical riposte to her desire to replace formal logic by the apparently woolier skills of reading and listening is that reading and listening depends for coherence and understanding on logic itself, and this is supposed to show that logic itself is logically prior to reading and listening. I first saw this riposte used by my old and honored teacher, E. D. Klemke, in a debate in 1969 with Northwestern's Henry Veatch: Veatch claimed that there are "two logics."

In "proving" that "there is one and only one logic, and I am its prophet", Klemke showed that the logic of reading and listening depends, on his view, on such propositions as p v ~p (any statement is true or false)...part of logic.

This seemed to me at the time conclusive, and I thought of it when I read Nye in 1990: but further reading in deconstruction and critical theory has persuaded me of a different way out of the impasse presented by professors Klemke and Veatch in 1969. This is seen in the keyword "logically prior": if what is at issue is the status of logic, then Veatch and later Nye are not the only ones committing the fallacy of petitio principii when they unconsciously use the logic reified by Bertrand Russel as p v ~P: for the very effort to determine the logical priority assumes that logical priority exists and is a Good Thing.

Derrida shows us a way out of this impasse by deconstructing the folly of attempting to categorize language into speech and writing, and prioritize speech. I can I believe use his method to indicate that critical listening and symbolic logic are probably two tokens for the same type, and because the underlying type (*arche*-logic, following Derrida's *arche*-writing) is a type it may have no proper name. Just as it is nonsense to make writing logically subordinate to speech when in remote societies, oral traditions play the logical role of writing, it is nonsense to debate the worth of a reified symbolic logic versus the praxis of critical reading, writing and speech.

Therefore I felt no compunction about using Nye's critique of the male history of logic. I do not interpret Nye as wanting to censor the use of symbolic logic in praxis, only to remove it from a false enthronement.

One reason for this is first-hand witness of the way in which reification of a technical and mathematical approach to logic can actually damage its very application: many computer projects using formal methods, especially formal methods imposed from on high, become nonproductive simply because of alienation.

Nye is correct: logic in its final perfection is insane for it is no longer contextualised in human praxis, it has become an isolated infernal machine in which we can change the axioms (or the program) to obtain the desired result. The computerized state is NOT the old liberal nightmare of complete inflexibility: instead, ungrounded flexibility treats all propositions as equivalent and undermines local authority and the mentoring of the young. Our society is dominated, as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig points out in CODE AND OTHER LAWS OF CYBERSPACE, by out of control logic in the form of code which increasingly structures our lives according to an invisible, random, and ever-changing will.

We need to critique its mindless, mechanical, and anti-human application...which is self-refuting and self-defeating, for the very liberty to change the axioms means that in actual practice, there is very little discipline among the development of logic-in-the-form-of-software, only subservience to authority.

Logic in its final perfection has realized the dimly apprehended dreams of the 19th century proto-symbolic logicians Boole and Jevons, for their research had led them into an increasingly externalized and technological direction, in the form of machines for doing simple logic. But in so doing, in Heidegger's language, it has transformed logic into standing reserve isolated in computer software.

The result in everyday discourse has been that logic (and the conservative hotbutton, the word "reason") has become spectral, a ghost that can be invoked only by name and not in use. On radio talk shows and the internet, it is thought that the very emphasis of liberalism on compassion is not "logic" and the name of reason and logic is frequently invoked against the content of compassion. But in so doing, the callers and posters frequently repeat the entire canon of informal and formal fallacies, including ad hominem and misapplied modus tollens. Precisely because logic has become a spectre, the callers and posters have frequent difficulty actually using it.

Nye gives us good introductory essays to the study of the philosophy of language: a topic that dominated philosophy for the past 100 years. While I don't think she gave enough space to postmodern theorists (she only included one passage from Foucault and nothing from Derrida), I do think that the ideas presented within give a more or less comprehensive look at the strands of thought associated with language.

I especially enjoyed the fact that this anthology was not dominated by the analytics, something that most philosophy of language books occasionally slip into. One might argue that the passages selected were too short. Many times Nye only selects four or five pages from an entire work to include in her anthology. I would agree that in some cases, more "meat" would have been necessary. However, in others (Russell, Frege, and Ayer in particular) more of a selection would have simply confused an introductory reader. Nye gives us a very good introductory look at the contemporary questions involving philosophy of language; she allows readers to become enthralled with the discipline just enough that they might decide to explore the topic further.

Throughout this book one may find translations of important letters between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth that are otherwise unavailable in English. This is, however, the book's only merit. The "commentary" on the letters reduces Elizabeth's often insightful objections to concerns about suitors who only care to (actual quote from the book) "get into her pants." Conjectures about an affair between Elizabeth and Descartes, generalizations about the trials and tribulations of court life and pure incompetence regarding all substantive points raised in the correspondence pervade the entire work. An absolute insult.