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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
For thousands of years, mathematicians have used the timeless art of logic to see the world more clearly. In The Art of Logic, Royal Society Science Book Prize nominee Eugenia Cheng shows how anyone can think like a mathematician - and see, argue and think better.
Learn how to simplify complex decisions without over-simplifying them. Discover the power of analogies and the dangers of false equivalences. Find out how people construct misleading arguments, and how we can argue back.
Eugenia Cheng teaches us how to find clarity without losing nuance, taking a careful scalpel to the complexities of politics, privilege, sexism and dozens of other real-world situations. Her Art of Logic is a practical and inspiring guide to decoding the modern world.
This book tells the story of human civilisation as a series of
historical periods, from Prehistory to the present day, describing
the way each evolved into the next. In so doing, it explains the
reasons behind what happened in each period, in terms of their
contribution to the whole. It describes the way the ideas process
evolves along with society, and explains the myths, religions and
philosophical ideas which developed in the Ancient world, and the
way its great empires appeared. Then, according to new technology
and principles, how the events of the Middle Ages led to the
rediscovery of the Americas and took us into the Modern periods,
where the industrial revolution gave rise to the Middle Classes,
and a new type of politics featured more representative forms of
government. However, after two world wars which redefined the era,
Postmodernity emerged as a term for the structure of Cold War
society, which gave rise to the success of digital technology, but
also led to the new problem of terrorism. Hence, many questions
have arisen over the direction of human society, how it has evolved
out of history, and how we address its issues. What type of
problems can we solve at each stage? Perhaps with computers we are
now able to analyse data in a way which was not possible before and
this will lead to the next era.
The Legacy of Aristotelian Enthymeme provides a historical-logical
analysis of Aristotle's rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme,
through its Medieval and Renaissance interpretations. Bringing
together notions of credibility and proof, an international team of
scholars highlight the fierce debates around this form of
argumentation during two key periods for Aristotle's beliefs.
Reflecting on medieval and humanist thinkers, philosophers, poets
and theologians, this volume joins up dialectical and rhetorical
argumentation as key to the enthymeme's interpretation and shows
how the enthymeme was the source of a major interpretive conflict.
As a method for achieving the standards for proof and credibility
that persist across diverse fields of study today including the
law, politics, medicine and morality, this book takes in Latin and
Persian interpretations of the enthymeme and casts contemporary
argumentation in a new historical light.
Logics of Worlds stands as one of the most important texts in
contemporary thought. Conceived as the sequel to Alan Badiou's
Being and Event, the book expands upon and elucidates the questions
that were posed in the first book. As a complex theory of worlds,
the text has, for the most part, been misunderstood, but in William
Watkin's diligent and critical close reading of the book, he makes
the case for Logics of Worlds being the essential Badiou book for
anyone interested in existence, meaning and the potential for
radical change. For Watkin, this recasting of ontology is followed
by a transformation of logic, which is not only a theory of being,
but of appearing and allows Badiou to give new meaning to the
object, body and relation. To do this, he explores these concepts
through architecture, astronomy and renowned thinkers such as Kant,
Hegel and Kierkegaard. For students of French Continental
philosophy, ontology and Badiou himself, Watkin's commentary on the
philosopher's text provides a brilliant and incisive new
interpretation of this underrated work by the leading Continental
philosopher of our time.
The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to
determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of
inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional
approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive
inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a
single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After
millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been
unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist.The
Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these
enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that
inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account
with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is
no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each
domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its
extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain.
Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in
science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The
Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the
analysis of inductive inference.
The philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870-c. 950 CE) is a key
Arabic intermediary figure. He knew Aristotle, and in particular
Aristotle's logic, through Greek Neoplatonist interpretations
translated into Arabic via Syriac and possibly Persian. For
example, he revised a general description of Aristotle's logic by
the 6th century Paul the Persian, and further influenced famous
later philosophers and theologians writing in Arabic in the 11th to
12th centuries: Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Avempace and Averroes.
Averroes' reports on Farabi were subsequently transmitted to the
West in Latin translation. This book is an abridgement of
Aristotle's Prior Analytics, rather than a commentary on successive
passages. In it Farabi discusses Aristotle's invention, the
syllogism, and aims to codify the deductively valid arguments in
all disciplines. He describes Aristotle's categorical syllogisms in
detail; these are syllogisms with premises such as 'Every A is a B'
and 'No A is a B'. He adds a discussion of how categorical
syllogisms can codify arguments by induction from known examples or
by analogy, and also some kinds of theological argument from
perceived facts to conclusions lying beyond perception. He also
describes post-Aristotelian hypothetical syllogisms, which draw
conclusions from premises such as 'If P then Q' and 'Either P or
Q'. His treatment of categorical syllogisms is one of the first to
recognise logically productive pairs of premises by using
'conditions of productivity', a device that had appeared in the
Greek Philoponus in 6th century Alexandria.
As the foundation of our rationality, logic has traditionally been
considered fixed, stable and constant. This conception of the
discipline has been challenged recently by the plurality of logics
and in this book, Pavel Arazim extends the debate to offer a new
view of logic as dynamic and without a definite, specific shape.
The Problem of Plurality of Logics examines the origins of our
standard view of logic alongside Kant's theories, the holistic
view, the issue of logic's pragmatic significance and Robert
Brandom's logical expressivism. Arazim then draws on
proof-theoretical approaches to present a convincing argument for a
dynamic version of logical inferentialism, which opens space for a
new freedom to modify our own logic. He explores the scope,
possibilities and limits of this freedom in order to highlight the
future paths logic could take, as a motivation for further
research. Marking a departure from logical monism and also from the
recent doctrine of logical pluralism in its various forms, this
book addresses current debates concerning the expressive role of
logic and contributes to a lively area of discussion in analytic
philosophy.
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.
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