HSE and University of Campinas Celebrate World Logic Day Together

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On January 15, 2025, the Russian-Brazilian Colloquium on Logical Pluralism was held at the HSE International Laboratory for Logic, Linguistics and Formal Philosophy to mark World Logic Day. This event was part of the joint project ‘Pluralistic Perspectives on Logic and Formal Philosophy,’ implemented by the laboratory and the Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science at the University of Campinas (Brazil) under the International Academic Cooperation competition.

Elena Dragalina-Chernaya, Head of the International Laboratory for Logic, Linguistics, and Formal Philosophy and professor at the HSE School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, spoke about the colloquium, which brought together scholars from different countries, disciplines, and generations.

Elena Dragalina-Chernaya

‘This year marks the seventh celebration of World Logic Day. We first observed it on January 14, 2019, when our laboratory became one of the organisers, inviting scholars from the departments of logic at Moscow State University and the RAS Institute of Philosophy to HSE to discuss the prospects of formal philosophy. Today, we celebrate World Logic Day as part of an international research team uniting mathematicians and philosophers from HSE and the University of Campinas in Brazil.

The interdisciplinary nature of modern logic, which finds applications in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and other cognitive sciences, as well as in any field dealing with argumentation and decision-making under uncertainty—ranging from management to social networks and neural networks—makes it a significant public asset. This was recognised when UNESCO added World Logic Day to its calendar of international days in 2020. In 2025, scholars from over 100 academic centres across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa participated in the celebration. As in 2019, Russia and Brazil led in the number of participating academic institutions.

The date of January 14 for World Logic Day was chosen as a tribute to two great logicians of the 20th century: Alfred Tarski, born on this day in 1901, and Kurt Gödel, who passed away on this day in 1978. These scholars not only demonstrated the effectiveness of formal logical methods in diverse fields—from mathematics and computer science to philosophy and even theology—but also, through their famous incompleteness theorems, precisely defined the limits of the expressive and deductive capabilities of formal systems. Developing Gödel's and Tarski's ideas, logic cannot help but reflect on its own assumptions, foundations, and prospects. Logic, which has been the foundation of rationality and the unity of scientific knowledge since antiquity and became a driver for artificial intelligence in the 21st century, is now characterised by a pluralism of formal systems. This key feature of modern logic and the formal philosophy based on its methods became the focus of our joint project with our Brazilian colleagues. Like the project as a whole, the colloquium dedicated to celebrating World Logic Day brought together scholars from different countries and disciplines, as well as—equally importantly—from different generations. We discussed new results in the field of non-classical logics achieved by project participants, including both internationally renowned scholars and early-career researchers, such as winners of the 2024 HSE Student Research Paper Competition in mathematics and philosophy.’