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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
This new digital edition of The Trial and Death of Socrates:
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo presents Benjamin Jowett's
classic translations, as revised by Enhanced Media Publishing. A
number of new or expanded annotations are also included.
This volume is a result of the international symposium "The
Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture," which
took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost
all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some
additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria,
the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the
history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of
analytic philosophy. They present the School's achievements as well
as its connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also
show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily.
The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well
as historians of philosophy in Central Europe.
Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity was one of the most influential
philosophical works of the twentieth century. In this collection of
essays leading specialists explore issues arising from this and
other works of Kripke's.
This book explores what it means to be 'critical' in different
disciplines in higher education and how students can be taught to
be effective critical thinkers. This book clarifies the idea of
critical thinking by investigating the 'critical' practices of
academics across a range of disciplines. Drawing on key theorists -
Wittgenstein, Geertz, Williams, Halliday - and using a
'textographic' approach, the book explores how the concept of
critical thinking is understood by academics and also how it is
constructed discursively in the texts and practices they employ in
their teaching. Critical thinking is one of the most widely
discussed concepts in debates on university learning. For many, the
idea of teaching students to be critical thinkers characterizes
more than anything else the overriding purpose of 'higher
education'. But whilst there is general agreement about its
importance as an educational ideal, there is surprisingly little
agreement about what the concept means exactly. Also at issue is
how and what students need to be taught in order to be properly
critical in their field. This searching monograph seeks answers to
these important questions.
A proof is a successful demonstration that a conclusion necessarily
follows by logical reasoning from axioms which are considered
evident for the given context and agreed upon by the community. It
is this concept that sets mathematics apart from other disciplines
and distinguishes it as the prototype of a deductive science.
Proofs thus are utterly relevant for research, teaching and
communication in mathematics and of particular interest for the
philosophy of mathematics. In computer science, moreover, proofs
have proved to be a rich source for already certified algorithms.
This book provides the reader with a collection of articles
covering relevant current research topics circled around the
concept 'proof'. It tries to give due consideration to the depth
and breadth of the subject by discussing its philosophical and
methodological aspects, addressing foundational issues induced by
Hilbert's Programme and the benefits of the arising formal notions
of proof, without neglecting reasoning in natural language proofs
and applications in computer science such as program extraction.
Since the middle of the 20th century Ludwig Wittgenstein has been
an exceptionally influential and controversial figure wherever
philosophy is studied. This is the most comprehensive volume ever
published on Wittgenstein: thirty-five leading scholars explore the
whole range of his thought, offering critical engagement and
original interpretation, and tracing his philosophical development.
Topics discussed include logic and mathematics, language and mind,
epistemology, philosophical methodology, religion, ethics, and
aesthetics. Wittgenstein's relation to other founders of analytic
philosophy such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore
is explored. This Handbook is the place to look for a full
understanding of Wittgenstein's special importance to modern
philosophy.
Writing on the justification of certain inductive inferences, the
author proposes that sometimes induction is justified and that
arguments to prove otherwise are not cogent. In the first part he
examines the problem of justifying induction, looks at some
attempts to prove that it is justified, and responds to criticisms
of these proofs. In the second part he deals with such topics as
formal logic, deductive logic, the theory of logical probability,
and probability and truth.
This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful
framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various
contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a
compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first
familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics
framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful
meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of
adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents
formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different
contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative
reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of
adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model
defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status
of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible
reasoning.
This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation
of Heidegger's late work. This period of Heidegger's philosophy
remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider
it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly
concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes
seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism -
namely the position according to which some contradictions are true
- and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an
entity is neither incoherent nor logically trivial. The author
achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has
an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most
discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory,
into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make
sense of Heidegger's concept of nothingness, the author introduces
an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a
paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies
without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to
set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger
in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to
Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of
grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic.
Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge addresses a philosophical
subject-the nature of truth and knowledge-but treats it in a way
that draws on insights beyond the usual confines of modern
philosophy. This ambitious collection includes contributions from
established scholars in philosophy, theology, mathematics,
chemistry, biology, psychology, literary criticism, history, and
architecture. It represents an attempt to integrate the insights of
these disciplines and to help them probe their own basic
presuppositions and methods. The essays in Forms of Truth and the
Unity of Knowledge are collected into five parts, the first dealing
with division of knowledge into multiple disciplines in Western
intellectual history; the second with the foundational disciplines
of epistemology, logic, and mathematics; the third with explanation
in the natural sciences; the fourth with truth and understanding in
disciplines of the humanities; and the fifth with art and theology.
Contributors: Vittorio Hoesle, Keith Lehrer, Robert Hanna, Laurent
Lafforgue, Thomas Nowak, Francisco J. Ayala, Zygmunt Pizlo, Osborne
Wiggins, Allan Gibbard, Carsten Dutt, Aviezer Tucker, Nicola Di
Cosmo, Michael Lykoudis, and Celia Deane-Drummond.
Every thoughtful person must ask, "What do I know?" The two most
explosive fields, religion and politics, are notably filled with
strident and conflicting claims. Close analysis in clear language
reveals that no one knows what he or she is talking about. Because
of the challenge of unexamined assumptions, of unclear
cause-and-effect relationships, and of the rarity of reliable
sources, a person who wants to be open-minded cannot avoid adopting
skepticism as the least embarrassing philosophy. Some discoveries
made in this book: *Reason appears to prove nothing *Intuition is
probably a delusion *Facts are slippery *Religious people yearn for
suicide *Why socialism cannot work *Where conservatives screwed up
badly (as they admit) *The equation STAR+2R+R3=GPS explains the
cultural history of the world *Shakespeare was a skeptic *Dante's
curious insight into love *Passing the Magic Johnson test *Tom De
Lay does not realize that relativism is as American as apple pie
*Hamlet, who never existed, is more real than you or I. Here is a
sample observation: "People believe in God because the Bible tells
all about him, and they believe in the Bible because God wrote or
inspired it. This is a classic case of the Fallacy of Circular
Reasoning."
Frege's puzzle concerning belief reports has been in the middle of
the discussion on semantics and pragmatics of attitude reports: The
intuition behind the opacity does not seem to be consistent with
the thesis of semantic innocence according to which the semantic
value of proper names is nothing but their referent. Main tasks of
this book include providing truth-conditional content of belief
reports. Especially, the focus is on semantic values of proper
names. The key aim is to extend Crimmins's basic idea of semantic
pretense and the introduction of pleonastic entities proposed by
Schiffer. They enable us to capture Frege's puzzle in the analysis
without giving up semantic innocence. To reach this conclusion, two
issues are established. First, based on linguistic evidence, the
frame of belief reports functions adverbially rather than
relationally. Second, the belief ascriptions, on which each belief
report is made, must be analyzed in terms of the
measurement-theoretic analogy.
One hundred years ago, Russell and Whitehead published their
epoch-making Principia Mathematica (PM), which was initially
conceived as the second volume of Russell's Principles of
Mathematics (PoM) that had appeared ten years before. No other
works can be credited to have had such an impact on the development
of logic and on philosophy in the twentieth century. However, until
now, scholars only focused on the first parts of the books - that
is, on Russell's and Whitehead's theory of logic, set-theory and
arithmetic.
Sebastien Gandon aims at reversing the perspective. His goal is to
give a picture of Russell's logicism based on a detailed reading of
the developments dealing with advanced mathematics - namely
projective geometry and the theory of quantity. This book is not
only the first study ever made of the 'later' portions of PoM and
PM, it also shows how this shift of perspective compels us to
change our view of the logicist program taken as a whole.
How science can convey a profound sense of wonder, connectedness,
and optimism about the human condition.
This book makes a compelling case that now more than ever the
public at large needs to appreciate the critical-thinking tools
that science has to offer and be educated in basic science
literacy. The author emphasizes that the methods and facts of
science are accessible to everyone, and that, contrary to popular
belief, understanding science does not require extraordinary
intelligence. He also notes that scientific rationality and
critical thinking are not only good for our physical well-being but
also are fully in sync with our highest moral codes. He illustrates
the many ways in which the scientific worldview offers a profound
sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human
condition, an inspiring perspective that satisfies age-old
spiritual aspirations.
At a time of daunting environmental challenges and rampant
misinformation, this book provides a welcome corrective and reason
to hope for the future.
Is critical argumentation an effective way to overcome
disagreement? And does the exchange of arguments bring opponents in
a controversy closer to the truth? This study provides a new
perspective on these pivotal questions. By means of multi-agent
simulations, it investigates the truth and consensus-conduciveness
of controversial debates. The book brings together research in
formal epistemology and argumentation theory. Aside from its
consequences for discursive practice, the work may have important
implications for philosophy of science and the way we construe
scientific rationality as well.
This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques
of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author
structures his project around two focal questions. What would it
take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with
reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write
a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived
literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the
most semantically distinctive feature of the sentences of fiction
is that they areunambiguously true and false together. It is true
that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also
concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of
fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and
isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked,
would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed.
According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled
sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not
logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the
inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived
logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain
why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their
embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of
fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or
four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken
impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of
fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some
of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary
philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and
cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them.
Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem
with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is
data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect
collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and
cognition.
Truth Through Proof defends an anti-platonist philosophy of
mathematics derived from game formalism. Classic formalists claimed
implausibly that mathematical utterances are truth-valueless moves
in a game. Alan Weir aims to develop a more satisfactory successor
to game formalism utilising a widely accepted, broadly neo-Fregean
framework, in which the proposition expressed by an utterance is a
function of both sense and background circumstance. This framework
allows for sentences whose truth-conditions are not
representational, which are made true or false by conditions
residing in the circumstances of utterances but not transparently
in the sense.
Applications to projectivism and fiction pave the way for the claim
that mathematical utterances are made true or false by the
existence of concrete proofs or refutations, though these
truth-making conditions form no part of their sense or
informational content.
The position is compared with rivals, an account of the
applicability of mathematics developed, and a new account of the
nature of idealisation proffered in which it is argued that the
finitistic limitations Godel placed on proofs are without rational
justification. Finally a non-classical logical system is provided
in which excluded middle fails, yet enough logical power remains to
recapture the results of standard mathematics.
A Chance for Possibility defends the view that the objective modal
realm is tripartite: truths about possible worlds supervene on
modal truths, which in turn supervene on truths about objective
chances. An understanding of supervenience in terms of grounding is
developed which - unlike the standard modal characterization -
allows the question of what modal truths supervene on to have a
non-trivial answer. Relying on this understanding, a negative
result is established: modal truths do not supervene on truths
about possible worlds, whether possible worlds are conceived of as
Lewisian concreta or as abstract objects of some kind. Instead, a
conception of pleonastic possible worlds is developed that reverses
the direction of supervenience. On the basis of linguistic
considerations concerning our use of natural language 'might' and
'might have' sentences, Steinberg finally argues that truths about
objective chances are able to provide a supervenience base for
modal truths. A Chance for Possibility is an investigation in
analytic metaphysics, drawing on related work in the philosophy of
logic and language as well as linguistics. It provides a detailed
case study for the fruitful use of a notion of grounding in the
clarification and evaluation of longstanding philosophical issues.
This book presents the current state of the art regarding the
application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice
of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the
analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning
concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the
process of law making have variously emphasised its political,
social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical
analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools
in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least
to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems-and
some possible solutions-as seen through the work of leading
contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written
by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on
the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to
the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices
concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book
presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the
emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the
area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal
systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented
by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the
structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of
deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic
concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How
are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of
legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of
contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging
from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in
this definitive collection.
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