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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
This book contains 20 essays tracing the work of David Zarefsky, a leading North American scholar of argumentation from a rhetorical perspective.The essays cohere around 4 general themes: objectives for studying argumentation rhetorically, approaches to rhetorical study of argumentation, patterns and schemes of rhetorical argumentation, and case studies illustrating the potential of studying argumentation rhetorically.These articles are drawn from across Zarefsky's 45-year career. Many of these articles originally appeared in publications that are difficult to access today, and this collection brings the reader up to date on the topic. Zarefsky's scholarship focuses on the role of language in political argumentation, the ways in which argumentation creates public knowledge and belief, the influence of framing and context on what is said and understood, the deployment of particular patterns and schemes of argumentation in public reasoning, and the influence of debate on politics and governance. All these topics are addressed in this book. Each of the conceptual essays includes brief application to specific cases, and five extended case studies are also presented in this volume. The case studies cover different themes: two explore famous political debates, the third focuses on presidential rhetoric across the course of United States history, the fourth on the arguments for liberalism at a time of political polarization, and the fifth on the contemporary effort to engage the United States with the Muslim world. This bookis ofinterest to scholars in the fields of philosophy, logic, law, philosophy of law, and legal history. The range of topics and concepts addressed, the interplay of concepts and cases and the unifying perspective of rhetorical argumentation make this book a valuable read for students of argumentative practice, whether rhetorically or otherwise."
This collection of papers, celebrating the contributions of Swedish logician Dag Prawitz to Proof Theory, has been assembled from those presented at the Natural Deduction conference organized in Rio de Janeiro to honour his seminal research. Dag Prawitz's work forms the basis of intuitionistic type theory and his inversion principle constitutes the foundation of most modern accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in Logic, Linguistics and Theoretical Computer Science. The range of contributions includes material on the extension of
natural deduction with higher-order rules, as opposed to
higher-order connectives, and a paper discussing the application of
natural deduction rules to dealing with equality in predicate
calculus. The volume continues with a key chapter summarizing work
on the extension of the Curry-Howard isomorphism (itself a
by-product of the work on natural deduction), via methods of
category theory that have been successfully applied to linear
logic, as well as many other contributions from highly regarded
authorities. With an illustrious group of contributors addressing a
wealth of topics and applications, this volume is a valuable
addition to the libraries of academics in the multiple disciplines
whose development has been given added scope by the methodologies
supplied by natural deduction. The volume is representative of the
rich and varied directions that Prawitz work has inspired in the
area of natural deduction.
'Fascinating', 'brilliant', 'oddly moving', 'a warm human picture' - this biography was enthusiastically received when it came out in 1957. And no wonder. It is not only the lively story of a distinguished man but a lucid account of his work and its significance. The author, who was himself a philosopher and journalist, has followed the bright thread of Russell's personality with affectionate insight, from the three-day-old baby who looked about him 'in a very energetic way', and the boy who jibbed at taking Euclid on trust, through the many turns of his life, to the undimmed octogenarian, still questioning and still deeply concerned. The subject is a great one and the biographer has matched it.
Bertrand Russell s eminence of intellect and person has long been unassailable. Besides his distinction as mathematician and philosopher, and a vast output of books, articles, lectures and talks on most aspects of the human condition, there is his continuing concern for day-to-day political issues, his championing of individual freedom and his readiness to stand for a cause to the point of imprisonment. To have distilled the essence of his ninety-odd years into this little book is itself quite an achievement. Originally published in 1962, it has been called a pocket guide to greatness and forms a useful complement to the longer and slightly earlier study by Alan Wood s "The Passionate Sceptic."
When future generations come to analyze and survey twentieth-century philosophy as a whole, Bertrand Russell s logic and theory of knowledge is assured a place of prime importance. Yet until this book was first published in 1969 no comprehensive treatment of his epistemology had appeared. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy at the time assumed that Russell s important contributions to the theory of knowledge were made before 1921. This book challenges that assumption and draws attention to features of Russell s later work which were overlooked. The analysis starts with Russell s earliest views and moves from book to book and article to article through his enormous span of writing on the problems and theory of knowledge. The changes in ideas as he developed the theory are traced, and the study culminates in a statement of his latest views. His work is seen in a continuity in which the changes were part of the development of his mature thought, and the total evaluation and interpretation clarify many of the common misunderstandings of his philosophy. This is naturally of interest to all philosophers, and for students this is the answer to inevitable questions on the nature of Russell s ideas and their evolution.
The volume analyses and develops David Makinson s efforts to make classical logic useful outside its most obvious application areas. The book contains chapters that analyse, appraise, or reshape Makinson s work and chapters that develop themes emerging from his contributions. These are grouped into major areas to which Makinsons has made highly influential contributions and the volume in its entirety is divided into four sections, each devoted to a particular area of logic: belief change, uncertain reasoning, normative systems and the resources of classical logic. Among the contributions included in the volume, one chapter focuses on the inferential preferential method, i.e. the combined use of classical logic and mechanisms of preference and choice and provides examples from Makinson s work in non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and belief revision. One chapter offers a short autobiography by Makinson which details his discovery of modern logic, his travels across continents and reveals his intellectual encounters and inspirations. The chapter also contains an unusually explicit statement on his views on the (limited but important) role of logic in philosophy."
The book presents the state of the art of research into the legacy of interwar Polish analytic philosophy and exemplifies different approaches to the history of philosophy. It contains discussions and reconstructions of aspects of Polish philosophy and logic as well as reactions to and developments of this tradition.
Mathematics is as much a science of the real world as biology is. It is the science of the world's quantitative aspects (such as ratio) and structural or patterned aspects (such as symmetry). The book develops a complete philosophy of mathematics that contrasts with the usual Platonist and nominalist options.
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.
Moral philosophy is no longer being pursued from arm-chairs. Instead, ethical questions are dissected in the experimental lab. This volume enables its readers to immerse themselves into Experimental Ethics' history, its current topics and future perspectives, its methodology, and the criticism it is subject to.
In this study two strands of inferentialism are brought together: the philosophical doctrine of Brandom, according to which meanings are generally inferential roles, and the logical doctrine prioritizing proof-theory over model theory and approaching meaning in logical, especially proof-theoretical terms.
A 'self-refutation argument' is any argument which aims at showing that (and how) a certain thesis is self-refuting. This study was the first book-length treatment of ancient self-refutation and provides a unified account of what is distinctive in the ancient approach to the self-refutation argument, on the basis of close philological, logical and historical analysis of a variety of sources. It examines the logic, force and prospects of this original style of argumentation within the context of ancient philosophical debates, dispelling various misconceptions concerning its nature and purpose and elucidating some important differences which exist both within the ancient approach to self-refutation and between that approach, as a whole, and some modern counterparts of it. In providing a comprehensive account of ancient self-refutation, the book advances our understanding of influential and debated texts and arguments from philosophers like Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Academic sceptics, the Pyrrhonists and Augustine.
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 introduces a new form of argumentative analysis: rhetorical heuremes. The method applies the concepts of heuristic thinking, probability, and contingency in order to develop a better understanding of complex arguments in classical oratory. A new theory is required because Greek and Roman rhetoric cannot provide detailed answers to problems of strategic argumentation in the analysis of speeches. Building on scholarship in Ciceronian oratory, this book moves beyond the extant terminology and employs a concept of heuristic reasoning derived from the psychology of decision making and mathematical problem solving. The author analyses selected passages from Cicero's forensic speeches where arguments of probability are deployed, and shows that the Sophistic concept of probability can link ancient rhetoric and modern theories of argumentation. Six groups of heuremes are identified, each of which represents a form of probabilistic reasoning by which the orator plays upon the perception of the jurors.
Examines the relations between logic and philosophy over the last 150 years. Logic underwent a major renaissance beginning in the nineteenth century. Cantor almost tamed the infinite, and Frege aimed to undercut Kant by reducing mathematics to logic. These achievements were threatened by the paradoxes, like Russell's. This ferment generated excellent philosophy (and mathematics) by excellent philosophers (and mathematicians) up to World War II. This book provides a selective, critical history of the collaboration between logic and philosophy during this period. After World War II, mathematical logic became a recognized subdiscipline in mathematics departments, and consequently but unfortunately philosophers have lost touch with its monuments. This book aims to make four of them (consistency and independence of the continuum hypothesis, Post's problem, and Morley's theorem) more accessible to philosophers, making available the tools necessary for modern scholars of philosophy to renew a productive dialogue between logic and philosophy.
J. Anthony Blair is a prominent international figure in argumentation studies. He is among the originators of informal logic, an author of textbooks on the informal logic approach to argument analysis and evaluation and on critical thinking, and a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. Blair is widely recognized among the leaders in the field for contributing formative ideas to the argumentation literature of the last few decades. This selection of key works provides insights into the history of the field of argumentation theory and various related disciplines. It illuminates the central debates and presents core ideas in four main areas: Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Argument Theory and Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric.
The Evolution of Logic examines the relations between logic and philosophy over the last 150 years. Logic underwent a major renaissance beginning in the nineteenth century. Cantor almost tamed the infinite, and Frege aimed to undercut Kant by reducing mathematics to logic. These achievements were threatened by the paradoxes, like Russell s. This ferment generated excellent philosophy (and mathematics) by excellent philosophers (and mathematicians) up to World War II. This book provides a selective, critical history of the collaboration between logic and philosophy during this period. After World War II, mathematical logic became a recognized subdiscipline in mathematics departments, and consequently but unfortunately philosophers have lost touch with its monuments. This book aims to make four of them (consistency and independence of the continuum hypothesis, Post s problem, and Morley s theorem) more accessible to philosophers, making available the tools necessary for modern scholars of philosophy to renew a productive dialogue between logic and philosophy."
The history of interwar Polish logic, including philosophical logic, is still a relatively little known area, especially if compared with the movement's well-documented contemporaries - the Vienna Circle or the Berlin Circle, for instance. The book aims to address this lacuna, by presenting the state of the art of research into this part of the history of analytic philosophy. It comprises thirteen essays, written by outstanding philosophers and exemplifying different approaches to the history of philosophy. One approach focuses on some little known aspects of Polish philosophy (e.g., Lesniewski's arithmetic, Tarski's geometry, philosophy of mathematics in interwar Krakow), analyzing it in great detail, sometimes by using current formal techniques. Another group of papers looks at the inspiration the Poles got from the founding fathers of analytic philosophy (Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein), and locates Polish philosophy in the larger landscape of European analytic philosophy. Finally, some contributors pick a topic from the Polish school (sometimes only mentioned, but not developed by the Poles), and construct an alternative account which is then compared with the earlier account. Most of the papers were presented at a symposium celebrating the 70th birthday of Jan Wolenski, whose book "Logic and Philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School" has played a substantial role in sparking contemporary interest in Polish analytic philosophy.
L.E.J. Brouwer (1881-1966) is best known for his revolutionary ideas on topology and foundations of mathematics (intuitionism). The present collection contains a mixture of letters; university and faculty correspondence has been included, some of which shed light on the student years, and in particular on the exchange of letters with his PhD adviser, Korteweg. Acting as the natural sequel to the publication of Brouwer's biography, this book provides instrumental reading for those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Brouwer and his role in the twentieth century. Striking a good balance of biographical and scientific information, the latter deals with innovations in topology (Cantor-Schoenflies style and the new topology) and foundations. The topological period in his research is well represented in correspondence with Hilbert, Schoenflies, Poincare, Blumenthal, Lebesgue, Baire, Koebe, and foundational topics are discussed in letters exchanged with Weyl, Fraenkel, Heyting, van Dantzig and others. There is also a large part of correspondence on matters related to the interbellum scientific politics. This book will appeal to both graduate students and researchers with an interest in topology, the history of mathematics, the foundations of mathematics, philosophy and general science.
The book presents a thoroughly elaborated logical theory of generalized truth-values understood as subsets of some established set of (basic) truth values. After elucidating the importance of the very notion of a truth value in logic and philosophy, we examine some possible ways of generalizing this notion. The useful four-valued logic of first-degree entailment by Nuel Belnap and the notion of a bilattice (a lattice of truth values with two ordering relations) constitute the basis for further generalizations. By doing so we elaborate the idea of a multilattice, and most notably, a trilattice of truth values - a specific algebraic structure with information ordering and two distinct logical orderings, one for truth and another for falsity. Each logical order not only induces its own logical vocabulary, but determines also its own entailment relation. We consider both semantic and syntactic ways of formalizing these relations and construct various logical calculi.
This book provides a new, linguistic approach to Argumentation
Theory. Its main goal is to integrate the logical, dialectical and
rhetorical dimensions of argumentation in a model providing a
unitary treatment of its justificatory and persuasive powers. This
model takes as its basis Speech Acts Theory in order to
characterize argumentation as a second-order speech act complex.
The result is a systematic and comprehensive theory of the
interpretation, analysis and evaluation of arguments. This theory
sheds light on the many faces of argumentative communication:
verbal and non-verbal, monological and dialogical, literal and
non-literal, ordinary and specialized.
Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche remain two of the most
interesting and compelling thinkers for contemporary readers.
Rejecting the dry, dispassionate tone of most academic philosophy,
these thinkers offer witty, penetrating critiques of many modern
values as well as passionately moving portraits of alternative
ideals. This work reveals that what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche most
fundamentally share, and what can be their greatest contribution to
contemporary ethics, is a method of illustrating and evaluating
different ways of life considered as a whole. In asking what way of
life is best, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche revive an ancient approach
to ethics largely neglected throughout the modern era. This work
offers a detailed elucidation of this method and of their
respective ideals, Kierkegaard's life of faith and Nietzsche's life
of individual sovereignty. These ideals are explored within each
thinker's typology of different ways of life and then compared and
contrasted with each other.
It is the aim of the present study to introduce the reader to the ways of thinking of those contemporary philosophers who apply the tools of symbolic logic to classical philosophical problems. Unlike the "conti nental" reader for whom this work was originally written, the English speaking reader will be more familiar with most of the philosophers dis cussed in this book, and he will in general not be tempted to dismiss them indiscriminately as "positivists" and "nominalists." But the English version of this study may help to redress the balance in another respect. In view of the present emphasis on ordinary language and the wide spread tendency to leave the mathematical logicians alone with their technicalities, it seems not without merit to revive the interest in formal ontology and the construction of formal systems. A closer look at the historical account which will be given here, may convince the reader that there are several points in the historical develop ment whose consequences have not yet been fully assessed: I mention, e. g., the shift from the traditional three-level semantics of sense and deno tation to the contemporary two-level semantics of representation; the relation of extensional structure and intensional content in the extensional systems of Wittgenstein and Carnap; the confusing changes in labelling the different kinds of analytic and apriori true sentences; etc. Among the philosophically interesting tools of symbolic logic Lesniewski's calculus of names deserves special attention."
This book grew out of my confusion. If logic is objective how can there be so many logics? Is there one right logic, or many right ones? Is there some underlying unity that connects them? What is the significance of the mathematical theorems about logic which I've learned if they have no connection to our everyday reasoning? The answers I propose revolve around the perception that what one pays attention to in reasoning determines which logic is appropriate. The act of abstracting from our reasoning in our usual language is the stepping stone from reasoned argument to logic. We cannot take this step alone, for we reason together: logic is reasoning which has some objective value. For you to understand my answers, or perhaps better, conjectures, I have retraced my steps: from the concrete to the abstract, from examples, to general theory, to further confirming examples, to reflections on the significance of the work.
Though the subject of this work, "nominalism and contemporary nom inalism," is philosophical, it cannot be fully treated without relating it to data gathered from a great variety of domains, such as biology and more especially ethology, psychology, linguistics and neurobiology. The source of inspiration has been an academic work I wrote in order to obtain a postdoctoral degree, which is called in Belgium an "Aggregaat voor het Hoger Onderwijs" comparable to a "Habilitation" in Germany. I want to thank the National Fund of Scientific Research, which accorded me several grants and thereby enabled me to write the academic work in the first place and thereafter this book. I also want to thank Prof. SJ. Doorman (Technical University of Delft) and Prof. G. Nuchelmans (University of Leiden), who were members of the jury of the "Aggre gaatsthesis," presented to the Free University of Brussels in 1981 and who by their criticisms and suggestions encouraged me to write the present book, the core of which is constituted by the general ideas then formulated. I am further obliged to Mr. X, the referee who was asked by Jaakko Hintikka to read my work and who made a series of constructive remarks and recom mendations. My colleague Marc De Mey (University of Ghent) helped me greatly with the more formal aspects of my work and spent too much of his valuable time and energy to enable me to deliver a presentable copy. All remaining shortcomings are entirely my responsibility. I asked Prof." |
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