Forms of Thought, by E. J. Lowe.

Abstract

It was with great sadness that I heard of the death of E. J. Lowe in early January 2014. I have learned a great deal from his writings, and I very much regret not having completed the review which follows in time for him to comment on it. His contributions to the philosophical debates in which he partook, and which he did so much to shape, will be sorely missed. Lowe’s recent book Forms of Thought is subtitled ‘A Study in Philosophical Logic’. The preface and first chapter lay out what is meant by this: Lowe claims that the underlying aim of the discipline in which he is engaged (philosophical logic) is to ‘reveal forms of thought, at least to the extent that thoughts are propositional in character and thus capable of standing in logical relations to one another’ (p. ix); though he suggests that ‘in practice that task must be approached by investigating the structure of sentences in natural language — since it is in such sentences that our thoughts are clothed and communicated’ (p. ix). But the book, it seems to me, is equally an essay in what P. F. Strawson (Individuals, London: Methuen, 1959) called descriptive metaphysics: that is, it is an attempt not only to characterize our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about the world, but also to vindicate them as fundamentally correct. Describing what is to come, Lowe writes: I criticize the ontological presuppositions of the type of formal predicate logic that contemporary philosophers have inherited from the founders of modern quantificational logic, notably Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and propose some major reformations. This carries … forward the task … of constructing a system of formal logic which perspicuously reflects the neo-Aristotelian ontological presuppositions of my own preferred system of categorial ontology (p. 3)