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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Logic has attained in our century a development incomparably
greater than in any past age of its long history, and this has led
to such an enrichment and proliferation of its aspects, that the
problem of some kind of unified recom prehension of this discipline
seems nowadays unavoidable. This splitting into several subdomains
is the natural consequence of the fact that Logic has intended to
adopt in our century the status of a science. This always implies
that the general optics, under which a certain set of problems used
to be con sidered, breaks into a lot of specialized sectors of
inquiry, each of them being characterized by the introduction of
specific viewpoints and of technical tools of its own. The first
impression, that often accompanies the creation of one of such
specialized branches in a diSCipline, is that one has succeeded in
isolating the 'scientific core' of it, by restricting the somehow
vague and redundant generality of its original 'philosophical'
configuration. But, after a while, it appears that some of the
discarded aspects are indeed important and a new specialized domain
of investigation is created to explore them. By follOwing this
procedure, one finally finds himself confronted with such a variety
of independent fields of research, that one wonders whether the
fact of labelling them under a common denomination be nothing but
the contingent effect of a pure historical tradition."
"Intuition" has perhaps been the least understood and the most
abused term in philosophy. It is often the term used when one has
no plausible explanation for the source of a given belief or
opinion. According to some sceptics, it is understood only in terms
of what it is not, and it is not any of the better understood means
for acquiring knowledge. In mathematics the term has also
unfortunately been used in this way. Thus, intuition is sometimes
portrayed as if it were the Third Eye, something only mathematical
"mystics," like Ramanujan, possess. In mathematics the notion has
also been used in a host of other senses: by "intuitive" one might
mean informal, or non-rigourous, or visual, or holistic, or
incomplete, or perhaps even convincing in spite of lack of proof.
My aim in this book is to sweep all of this aside, to argue that
there is a perfectly coherent, philosophically respectable notion
of mathematical intuition according to which intuition is a
condition necessary for mathemati cal knowledge. I shall argue that
mathematical intuition is not any special or mysterious kind of
faculty, and that it is possible to make progress in the
philosophical analysis of this notion. This kind of undertaking has
a precedent in the philosophy of Kant. While I shall be mostly
developing ideas about intuition due to Edmund Husser there will be
a kind of Kantian argument underlying the entire book."
Model theory is used in every theoretical branch of analytic
philosophy: in philosophy of mathematics, in philosophy of science,
in philosophy of language, in philosophical logic, and in
metaphysics. But these wide-ranging uses of model theory have
created a highly fragmented literature. On the one hand, many
philosophically significant results are found only in mathematics
textbooks: these are aimed squarely at mathematicians; they
typically presuppose that the reader has a serious background in
mathematics; and little clue is given as to their philosophical
significance. On the other hand, the philosophical applications of
these results are scattered across disconnected pockets of papers.
The first aim of this book, then, is to explore the philosophical
uses of model theory, focusing on the central topics of reference,
realism, and doxology. Its second aim is to address important
questions in the philosophy of model theory, such as: sameness of
theories and structure, the boundaries of logic, and the
classification of mathematical structures. Philosophy and Model
Theory will be accessible to anyone who has completed an
introductory logic course. It does not assume that readers have
encountered model theory before, but starts right at the beginning,
discussing philosophical issues that arise even with conceptually
basic model theory. Moreover, the book is largely self-contained:
model-theoretic notions are defined as and when they are needed for
the philosophical discussion, and many of the most philosophically
significant results are given accessible proofs.
For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from
presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend
of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to
the participants in that conference, as well as to the National
Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of
Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The
advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters
proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the
success of the con ference. We also would like to thank the staff
of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl
as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and
Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura,
Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia
Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our
gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his
encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was
introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping
together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the
Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz
(1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on
phrase structure grammars."
The essays in Powerful Arguments reconstruct the standards of
validity underlying argumentative practices in a wide array of late
imperial Chinese discourses, from the Song through the Qing
dynasties. The fourteen case studies analyze concrete arguments
defended or contested in areas ranging from historiography,
philosophy, law, and religion to natural studies, literature, and
the civil examination system. By examining uses of evidence, habits
of inference, and the criteria by which some arguments were judged
to be more persuasive than others, the contributions recreate
distinct cultures of reasoning. Together, they lay the foundations
for a history of argumentative practice in one of the richest
scholarly traditions outside of Europe and add a chapter to the as
yet elusive global history of rationality.
Writing is essential to learning. One cannot be educated and yet
unable to communicate one's ideas in written form. But, learning to
write can occur only through a process of cultivation requiring
intellectual discipline. As with any set of complex skills, there
are fundamentals of writing that must be internalized and then
applied using one's thinking. This guide focuses on the most
important of those fundamentals.
Klemens Szaniawski was born in Warsaw on March 3, 1925. He began to
study philosophy in the clandestine Warsaw University during World
War II. Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Jan Lukasiewicz, Maria and Stanislaw
Ossowskis, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, and Henryk Hii: were among his
teachers. Sza- niawski was also a member of the Polish Home Army
(AK), one of the young- est. He was arrested and spent the last
period of the war as a prisoner in Auschwitz. After 1945, he
continued his studies in the University of L6dz; his Master thesis
was devoted to French moral thought of the 17th and 18th cen-
turies. Then he worked in the Department of Ethics in L6dZ. In
1950, he received his Ph. D. on the basis of the dissertation on
the concept of honour in knight groups in the Middle Ages; Maria
Ossowska was the supervisor. In the early fifties he moved to
Warsaw to the Department of Logic, directed by Kotarbinski. He took
his habilitation exams in 1961. In 1969 he became a professor.
Since 1970 he was the head of Department of the Logic at the Warsaw
University. In the sixties Szaniawski was also the Dean of the
Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology. In 1984 he was elected the
Rector Magnificus of the Warsaw University but the Ministry
overruled the autonomous democra- tic vote of the academic
community. He served as the President of the Polish (since 1977)
taking this post after Kotarbinski.
Frontiers in Belief Revision is a unique collection of leading edge
research in Belief Revision. It contains the latest innovative
ideas of highly respected and pioneering experts in the area,
including Isaac Levi, Krister Segerberg, Sven Ove Hansson, Didier
Dubois, and Henri Prade. The book addresses foundational issues of
inductive reasoning and minimal change, generalizations of the
standard belief revision theories, strategies for iterated
revisions, probabilistic beliefs, multiagent environments and a
variety of data structures and mechanisms for implementations. This
book is suitable for students and researchers interested in
knowledge representation and in the state of the art of the theory
and practice of belief revision.
The purpose of this book is to highlight Carl Stumpf's
contributions to philosophy and to assess some of the aspects of
his work. This book is divided into four sections, and also
includes a general introduction on Stumpf's philosophy. The first
section examines the historical sources of his philosophy, the
second examines some of the central themes of his work and the
third examines his relationship to other philosophers. The fourth
section consists of notes taken by Husserl during Stumpf's lectures
on metaphysics in Halle, Stumpf's introduction to the edition of
his correspondence with Brentano, which he prepared in 1929, and
some important letters pertaining to this correspondence. This book
also provides a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Stumpf.
This is a collection of, mostly unpublished, papers on topics surrounding decision theory. It addresses the most important areas in the philosophical study of rationality and knowledge, for example: causal vs. evidential decision theory, game theory, backwards induction, bounded rationality, counterfactual reasoning in games and in general, and analyses of the famous common knowledge assumptions in game theory.
Games, Norms, and Reasons: Logic at the Crossroads provides an
overview of modern logic focusing on its relationships with other
disciplines, including new interfaces with rational choice theory,
epistemology, game theory and informatics. This book continues a
series called "Logic at the Crossroads" whose title reflects a view
that the deep insights from the classical phase of mathematical
logic can form a harmonious mixture with a new, more ambitious
research agenda of understanding and enhancing human reasoning and
intelligent interaction. The editors have gathered together
articles from active authors in this new area that explore dynamic
logical aspects of norms, reasons, preferences and beliefs in human
agency, human interaction and groups. The book pays a special
tribute to Professor Rohit Parikh, a pioneer in this movement.
This book offers readers a collection of 50 short chapter entries
on topics in the philosophy of language. Each entry addresses a
paradox, a longstanding puzzle, or a major theme that has emerged
in the field from the last 150 years, tracing overlap with issues
in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, ethics, political
philosophy, and literature. Each of the 50 entries is written as a
piece that can stand on its own, though useful connections to other
entries are mentioned throughout the text. Readers can open the
book and start with almost any of the entries, following themes of
greatest interest to them. Each entry includes recommendations for
further reading on the topic. Philosophy of Language: 50 Puzzles,
Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is useful as a standalone
textbook, or can be supplemented by additional readings that
instructors choose. The accessible style makes it suitable for
introductory level through intermediate undergraduate courses, as
well as for independent learners, or even as a reference for more
advanced students and researchers. Key Features: Uses a
problem-centered approach to philosophy of language (rather than
author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to
first-time students of the subject. Offers stand-alone chapters,
allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving
instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes
of the course. Provides up-to-date recommended readings at the end
of each chapter, or about 500 sources in total, amounting to an
extensive review of the literature on each topic.
This monograph shows that, through a recourse to the concepts and
methods of abstract algebraic logic, the algebraic theory of
regular varieties and the concept of analyticity in formal logic
can profitably interact. By extending the technique of Plonka sums
from algebras to logical matrices, the authors investigate the
different classes of models for logics of variable inclusion and
they shed new light into their formal properties. The book opens
with the historical origins of logics of variable inclusion and on
their philosophical motivations. It includes the basics of the
algebraic theory of regular varieties and the construction of
Plonka sums over semilattice direct systems of algebra. The core of
the book is devoted to an abstract definition of logics of left and
right variable inclusion, respectively, and the authors study their
semantics using the construction of Plonka sums of matrix models.
The authors also cover Paraconsistent Weak Kleene logic and survey
its abstract algebraic logical properties. This book is of interest
to scholars of formal logic.
1. The ?rst edition of this book was published in 1977. The text
has been well received and is still used, although it has been out
of print for some time. In the intervening three decades, a lot of
interesting things have happened to mathematical logic: (i) Model
theory has shown that insights acquired in the study of formal
languages could be used fruitfully in solving old problems of
conventional mathematics. (ii) Mathematics has been and is moving
with growing acceleration from the set-theoretic language of
structures to the language and intuition of (higher) categories,
leaving behind old concerns about in?nities: a new view of
foundations is now emerging. (iii) Computer science, a no-nonsense
child of the abstract computability theory, has been creatively
dealing with old challenges and providing new ones, such as the
P/NP problem. Planning additional chapters for this second edition,
I have decided to focus onmodeltheory, the
conspicuousabsenceofwhichinthe ?rsteditionwasnoted in several
reviews, and the theory of computation, including its categorical
and quantum aspects. The whole Part IV: Model Theory, is new. I am
very grateful to Boris I. Zilber, who kindly agreed to write it. It
may be read directly after Chapter II. The contents of the ?rst
edition are basically reproduced here as Chapters I-VIII. Section
IV.7, on the cardinality of the continuum, is completed by Section
IV.7.3, discussing H. Woodin's discovery.
Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by
the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic
as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence
theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by
the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn t give the
world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative
analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there
is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language,
how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of
the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of
reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this
overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle,
and Sommers."
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