Aristotle's Topics is a handbook for dialectic, i.e. the exercise for philosophical debates between a questioner and a respondent. Alexander takes the Topics as a sort of handbook teaching how to defend and how attack any philosophical claim against philosophical adversaries. In book 3, Aristotle develops strategies for arguing about comparative claims, in which properties are said to belong to subjects to a greater, lesser, or equal degree. Aristotle illustrates the different argumentative patterns that can be used to establish or refute a comparative claim through one single example: whether something is more or less or equally to be chosen or to be avoided than something else. In his commentary on Topics 3, here translated for the first time into English, Alexander of Aphrodisias spells out Aristotle's text by referring to issues and examples from debates with other philosophical school (especially: the Stoics) of his time. The commentary provides new evidence for Alexander's views on the logic of comparison and is a relatively neglected source for Peripatetic ethics in late antiquity. This volume will be valuable reading for students of Aristotle and of the developments of Peripatetic logic and ethics in late antiquity.

Ibn Wasil (d. 1298), perhaps better known today as a historian and an emissary to the court of King Manfred in southern Italy, was also an eminent logician. The present work is a critical edition of his main work in the field, a commentary on his teacher Khunaji's (d. 1248) handbook al-Jumal. The work helped consolidate the logic of the "later scholars" (such as Khunaji). It also shows that commentators did much more than merely explain the original work and instead regularly discussed and assessed received views. Ibn Wasil's work was an influential contribution to a particularly dynamic chapter in the history of Arabic logic.

In Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue, Ellen Breitholtz presents a novel and precise account of reasoning from an interactional perspective. The account draws on the concepts of enthymemes and topoi, originating in Aristotelian rhetoric and dialectic, and integrates these in a formal dialogue semantic account using TTR, a type theory with records. Argumentation analysis and formal approaches to reasoning often focus the logical validity of arguments on inferences made in discourse from a god's-eye perspective. In contrast, Breitholtz's account emphasises the individual perspectives of interlocutors and the function and acceptability of their reasoning in context. This provides an analysis of interactions where interlocutors have access to different topoi and therefore make different inferences.

In 1906, Jan Lukasiewicz, a great logician, published his classic dissertation on the concept of cause, containing not only a thorough reconstruction of the title concept, but also a systematization of the analytical method. It sparked an extremely inspiring discussion among the other representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School. The main voices of this discussion are supplemented here with texts of contemporary Polish philosophers. They show how the concept of cause is presently functioning in various disciplines and point to the topicality of Lukasiewicz's method of analysis.

Assuming no previous study in logic, this informal yet rigorous text covers the material of a standard undergraduate first course in mathematical logic, using natural deduction and leading up to the completeness theorem for first-order logic. At each stage of the text, the reader is given an intuition based on standard mathematical practice, which is subsequently developed with clean formal mathematics. Alongside the practical examples, readers learn what can and can't be calculated; for example the correctness of a derivation proving a given sequent can be tested mechanically, but there is no general mechanical test for the existence of a derivation proving the given sequent. The undecidability results are proved rigorously in an optional final chapter, assuming Matiyasevich's theorem characterising the computably enumerable relations. Rigorous proofs of the adequacy and completeness proofs of the relevant logics are provided, with careful attention to the languages involved. Optional sections discuss the classification of mathematical structures by first-order theories; the required theory of cardinality is developed from scratch. Throughout the book there are notes on historical aspects of the material, and connections with linguistics and computer science, and the discussion of syntax and semantics is influenced by modern linguistic approaches. Two basic themes in recent cognitive science studies of actual human reasoning are also introduced. Including extensive exercises and selected solutions, this text is ideal for students in Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Computer Science.

In an age of internet scrolling and skimming, where concentration and attention are fast becoming endangered skills, it is timely to think about the act of reading and the many forms that it can take. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution makes the case for thinking about reading in philosophical terms. Boulous Walker argues that philosophy involves the patient work of thought; in this it resembles the work of art, which invites and implores us to take our time and to engage with the world. At its best, philosophy teaches us to read slowly; in fact, philosophy is the art of reading slowly - and this inevitably clashes with many of our current institutional practices and demands. Slow reading shares something in common with contemporary social movements, such as that devoted to slow food; it offers us ways to engage the complexity of the world. With the help of writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Adorno, Levinas, Critchley, Beauvoir, Le Doeuff, Irigaray, Cixous, Weil, and others, Boulous Walker offers a foundational text in the emerging field of slow philosophy, one that explores the importance of unhurried time in establishing our institutional encounters with complex and demanding works.

Locating poetry in a philosophy of the everyday, Brett Bourbon continues a tradition of attention to logic in everyday utterances through Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell, arguing that poems are events of form, not just collections of words, which shape everyone's lives. Poems taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst, albeit unknowingly. Bourbon resurrects these poems to construct an anthropology of form that centers everyday poems as events or interruptions within our lives. Expanding our understanding of what a poem is, this book argues that poems be understood as events of form that may depend on words but are not fundamentally constituted by them. This line of thought delves into a poem's linguistic particularity, to ask what a poem is and how we know. By reclaiming arenas previously ceded to essayists and literary writers, Bourbon reveals the care and attention necessary to uncovering the intimate relationship between poems, life, reading and living. A philosophical meditation on the nature of poetry, but also on the meaning of love and the claim of words upon us, Everyday Poetics situates the importance of everyday poems as events in our lives.