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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Originally published in 1914, this book presents an exposition of the elementary principles of logic. The text is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses the older system of logic, defined, in this context, as 'a carefully limited subject to get up for an elementary examination'. The second part discusses the modern system of logic, defined as 'a free study of some of the chief risks of error in reasoning'. Notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic and philosophy.
From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelboeck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelboeck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick-and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Goedel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.
How can we advance knowledge? Which methods do we need in order to make new discoveries? How can we rationally evaluate, reconstruct and offer discoveries as a means of improving the 'method' of discovery itself? And how can we use findings about scientific discovery to boost funding policies, thus fostering a deeper impact of scientific discovery itself? The respective chapters in this book provide readers with answers to these questions. They focus on a set of issues that are essential to the development of types of reasoning for advancing knowledge, such as models for both revolutionary findings and paradigm shifts; ways of rationally addressing scientific disagreement, e.g. when a revolutionary discovery sparks considerable disagreement inside the scientific community; frameworks for both discovery and inference methods; and heuristics for economics and the social sciences.
This meticulous critical assessment of the ground-breaking work of philosopher Stanislaw Lesniewski focuses exclusively on primary texts and explores the full range of output by one of the master logicians of the Lvov-Warsaw school. The author's nuanced survey eschews secondary commentary, analyzing Lesniewski's core philosophical views and evaluating the formulations that were to have such a profound influence on the evolution of mathematical logic. One of the undisputed leaders of the cohort of brilliant logicians that congregated in Poland in the early twentieth century, Lesniewski was a guide and mentor to a generation of celebrated analytical philosophers (Alfred Tarski was his PhD student). His primary achievement was a system of foundational mathematical logic intended as an alternative to the Principia Mathematica of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Its three strands-'protothetic', 'ontology', and 'mereology', are detailed in discrete sections of this volume, alongside a wealth other chapters grouped to provide the fullest possible coverage of Lesniewski's academic output. With material on his early philosophical views, his contributions to set theory and his work on nominalism and higher-order quantification, this book offers a uniquely expansive critical commentary on one of analytical philosophy's great pioneers.
This collection of essays explores the philosophy of human knowledge from a multitude of perspectives, with a particular emphasis upon the justification component of the classical analysis of knowledge and with an excursion along the way to explore the role of knowledge in Texas Hold 'Em poker. An important theme of the collection is the role of knowledge in religion, including a detailed argument for agnosticism. A number of the essays touch upon issues in philosophical logic, among them a fascinating new counter-example to Modus Ponens. The collection is rounded out with essays on causality and the philosophy of mind. The author's perspective on the philosophy of human knowledge is fresh and challenging, as evidenced by essays entitled "On Epistemic Preferability;" "On Being Unjustified;" "The Logic of 'Unless'" and "Is 'This sentence is true.' True?" An interesting feature of The Logic of Philosophy: Pesky Essays is the inclusion of responses to several of its key essays, contributed by such prominent contemporary philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, Ted Sider and Tomas Kapitan.
This collection of essays examines logic and its philosophy. The author investigates the nature of logic not only by describing its properties but also by showing philosophical applications of logical concepts and structures. He evaluates what logic is and analyzes among other aspects the relations of logic and language, the status of identity, bivalence, proof, truth, constructivism, and metamathematics. With examples concerning the application of logic to philosophy, he also covers semantic loops, the epistemic discourse, the normative discourse, paradoxes, properties of truth, truth-making as well as theology, being and logical determinism. The author concludes with a philosophical reflection on nothingness and its modelling.
G. E. Moore's fame as a philosopher rests on his ethics of love and beauty, which inspired Bloomsbury, and on his 'common sense' certainties which challenge abstract philosophical theory. Behind this lies his critical engagement with Kant's idealist philosophy, which is published here for the first time. These early writings, Moore's fellowship dissertations of 1897 and 1898, show how he initiated his influential break with idealism. In 1897 his main target was Kant's ethics, but by 1898 it was the whole Kantian project of transcendental philosophy that he rejected, and the theory which he developed to replace it gave rise to the new project of philosophy as logical analysis. This edition includes comments by Moore's examiners Henry Sidgwick, Edward Caird and Bernard Bosanquet, and in a substantial introduction the editors explore the crucial importance of the dissertations to the history of twentieth-century philosophical thought.
Western philosophy and science are responsible for constructing some powerful tools of investigation, aiming at discovering the truth, delivering robust explanations, verifying conjectures, showing that inferences are sound and demonstrating results conclusively. By contrast reasoning that depends on analogies has often been viewed with suspicion. Professor Lloyd first explores the origins of those Western ideals, criticises some of their excesses and redresses the balance in favour of looser, admittedly non-demonstrative analogical reasoning. For this he takes examples both from ancient Greek and Chinese thought and from the materials of recent ethnography to show how different ancient and modern cultures have developed different styles of reasoning. He also develops two original but controversial ideas, that of semantic stretch (to cast doubt on the literal/metaphorical dichotomy) and the multidimensionality of reality (to bypass the realism versus relativism and nature versus nurture controversies).
This book provides an argumentation model for means end-reasoning, a distinctive type of reasoning used for problem-solving and decision-making. Means end-reasoning is modelled as goal-directed argumentation from an agent's goals and known circumstances, and from an action selected as a means, to a decision to carry out the action. Goal-based Reasoning for Argumentation provides an argumentation model of this kind of reasoning showing how it is employed in settings of intelligent deliberation where agents try to collectively arrive at a conclusion on what they should do to move forward in a set of circumstances. The book explains how this argumentation model can help build more realistic computational systems of deliberation and decision-making, and shows how such systems can be applied to solve problems posed by goal-based reasoning in numerous fields, from social psychology and sociology, to law, political science, anthropology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and robotics.
The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce's work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce's theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce's theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice's philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.
This book presents diverse topics in mathematical logic such as proof theory, meta-mathematics, and applications of logic to mathematical structures. The collection spans the first 100 years of modern logic and is dedicated to the memory of Irving Anellis, founder of the journal 'Modern Logic', whose academic work was essential in promoting the algebraic tradition of logic, as represented by Charles Sanders Peirce. Anellis's association with the Russian logic community introduced their school of logic to a wider audience in the USA, Canada and Western Europe. In addition, the collection takes a historical perspective on proof theory and the development of logic and mathematics in Eastern Logic, the Soviet Union and Russia. The book will be of interest to historians and philosophers in logic and mathematics, and the more specialized papers will also appeal to mathematicians and logicians.
In this book, Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge distinguish various species of fictionalism, locating and defending their own version of philosophical fictionalism. Addressing semantic and philosophical puzzles that arise from ordinary language, they consider such issues as the problem of non-being, plural identity claims, mental-attitude ascriptions, meaning attributions, and truth-talk. They consider 'deflationism about truth', explaining why deflationists should be fictionalists, and show how their philosophical fictionalist account of truth-talk underwrites a dissolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. They further explore the semantic notions of reference and predicate-satisfaction, showing how philosophical fictionalism can also resolve puzzles that these notions appear to present. Their critical examination of fictionalist approaches in philosophy, together with the development and application of their own brand of philosophical fictionalism, will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and linguistics.
In recent years there have been a number of books-both anthologies and monographs-that have focused on the Liar Paradox and, more generally, on the semantic paradoxes, either offering proposed treatments to those paradoxes or critically evaluating ones that occupy logical space. At the same time, there are a number of people who do great work in philosophy, who have various semantic, logical, metaphysical and/or epistemological commitments that suggest that they should say something about the Liar Paradox, yet who have said very little, if anything, about that paradox or about the extant projects involving it. The purpose of this volume is to afford those philosophers the opportunity to address what might be described as reflections on the Liar.
As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze (1817-81) defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siecle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception.
This volume, "The Brazilian Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, "is the first attempt to present to a general audience, works from Brazil on this subject. The included papers are original, covering a remarkable number of relevant topics of philosophy of science, logic and on the history of science. The Brazilian community has increased in the last years in quantity and in quality of the works, most of them being published in respectable international journals on the subject. The chapters of this volume are forwarded by a general introduction, which aims to sketch not only the contents of the chapters, but it is conceived as a historical and conceptual guide to the development of the field in Brazil. The introduction intends to be useful to the reader, and not only to the specialist, helping them to evaluate the increase in production of this country within the international context. "
Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones (1848-1922) was an English logician and contemporary of Bertrand Russell, as well as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. In this book, originally published in 1911, she argues for the existence of another fundamental law of thought to join the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle: the Law of Significant Assertion. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic or in Jones' work.
This book demonstrates how analytical thinking and intuition can be systematically connected and trained. It is illustrated by figures and photographs and includes creative and stimulating exercises. We are living in a world of increasing complexity, in which perceiving reality accurately is increasingly important and difficult. Society's need to address "global grand challenges" requires that the scientific community initiates inter-disciplinary research programmes. These are often far removed from current programmes, which are usually based on intra-disciplinary science. Improving our understanding of complex problems and communicating this understanding to a large group of people from different backgrounds represents an important educational challenge. Connecting Analytical Thinking and Intuition stimulates students and scientists to improve their skills in thinking, communicating and learning more about being humans. A guide to connecting analytical thinking and intuition is presented using the "dream group" method developed by Montague Ullman, in which a group of 6-8 people systematically and carefully helps the dreamer to appreciate dreams. The importance of good memory, which can be trained through recalling the dreams, is also discussed in relation to science and literature.
The idea that mathematics is reducible to logic has a long history, but it was Frege who gave logicism an articulation and defense that transformed it into a distinctive philosophical thesis with a profound influence on the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. This volume of classic, revised and newly written essays by William Demopoulos examines logicism's principal legacy for philosophy: its elaboration of notions of analysis and reconstruction. The essays reflect on the deployment of these ideas by the principal figures in the history of the subject - Frege, Russell, Ramsey and Carnap - and in doing so illuminate current concerns about the nature of mathematical and theoretical knowledge. Issues addressed include the nature of arithmetical knowledge in the light of Frege's theorem; the status of realism about the theoretical entities of physics; and the proper interpretation of empirical theories that postulate abstract structural constraints.
Ricoeur lectured and wrote for over twenty years on negation ('Do I understand something better if I know what it is not, and what is not-ness?') and never published his extensive writings on this subject. Ricoeur concluded that there are multiple forms of negation; it can, for example, be the other person (Plato), the not knowable nature of our world (Kant), the included opposite (Hegel), apophatic spirituality (Plotinus on not being able to know God) and existential nothingness (Sartre). Ricoeur, working on Kant, Hegel and Sartre, decided that all these forms of negation are incompatible and also fatally flawed because they fail to resolve false binaries of negative: positive. Alison Scott-Baumann demonstrates how Ricoeur subsequently incorporated negation into his linguistic turn, using dialectics, metaphor, narrative, parable and translation in order to show how negation is in us, not outside us: language both creates and clarifies false binaries. He bestows upon negation a strong and central role in the human condition, and its inevitability is reflected in his writings, if we look carefully. Ricoeur and the Negation of Happiness draws on Ricoeur's published works, previously unavailable archival material and many other sources. Alison Scott-Baumann argues that thinking positively is necessary but not sufficient for aspiring to happiness - what is also required is affirmation of negative impulses: we know we are split by contradictions and still try to overcome them. She also demonstrates the urgency of analysing current socio-cultural debates about wellbeing, education and equality, which rest insecurely upon our loose use of the negative as a category mistake.
This volume is dedicated to Prof. Dag Prawitz and his outstanding contributions to philosophical and mathematical logic. Prawitz's eminent contributions to structural proof theory, or general proof theory, as he calls it, and inference-based meaning theories have been extremely influential in the development of modern proof theory and anti-realistic semantics. In particular, Prawitz is the main author on natural deduction in addition to Gerhard Gentzen, who defined natural deduction in his PhD thesis published in 1934. The book opens with an introductory paper that surveys Prawitz's numerous contributions to proof theory and proof-theoretic semantics and puts his work into a somewhat broader perspective, both historically and systematically. Chapters include either in-depth studies of certain aspects of Dag Prawitz's work or address open research problems that are concerned with core issues in structural proof theory and range from philosophical essays to papers of a mathematical nature. Investigations into the necessity of thought and the theory of grounds and computational justifications as well as an examination of Prawitz's conception of the validity of inferences in the light of three "dogmas of proof-theoretic semantics" are included. More formal papers deal with the constructive behaviour of fragments of classical logic and fragments of the modal logic S4 among other topics. In addition, there are chapters about inversion principles, normalization of p roofs, and the notion of proof-theoretic harmony and other areas of a more mathematical persuasion. Dag Prawitz also writes a chapter in which he explains his current views on the epistemic dimension of proofs and addresses the question why some inferences succeed in conferring evidence on their conclusions when applied to premises for which one already possesses evidence.
This is a collection of new investigations and discoveries on the theory of opposition (square, hexagon, octagon, polyhedra of opposition) by the best specialists from all over the world. The papers range from historical considerations to new mathematical developments of the theory of opposition including applications to theology, theory of argumentation and metalogic.
Formal languages are widely regarded as being above all mathematical objects and as producing a greater level of precision and technical complexity in logical investigations because of this. Yet defining formal languages exclusively in this way offers only a partial and limited explanation of the impact which their use (and the uses of formalisms more generally elsewhere) actually has. In this book, Catarina Dutilh Novaes adopts a much wider conception of formal languages so as to investigate more broadly what exactly is going on when theorists put these tools to use. She looks at the history and philosophy of formal languages and focuses on the cognitive impact of formal languages on human reasoning, drawing on their historical development, psychology, cognitive science and philosophy. Her wide-ranging study will be valuable for both students and researchers in philosophy, logic, psychology and cognitive and computer science.
This text offers an extension to the traditional Kripke semantics for non-classical logics by adding the notion of reactivity. Reactive Kripke models change their accessibility relation as we progress in the evaluation process of formulas in the model. This feature makes the reactive Kripke semantics strictly stronger and more applicable than the traditional one. Here we investigate the properties and axiomatisations of this new and most effective semantics, and we offer a wide landscape of applications of the idea of reactivity. Applied topics include reactive automata, reactive grammars, reactive products, reactive deontic logic and reactive preferential structures. Reactive Kripke semantics is the next step in the evolution of possible world semantics for non-classical logics, and this book, written by one of the leading authorities in the field, is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in applied logic, and it offers many research opportunities for PhD students.
Featuring fourteen new essays from an international team of renowned contributors, this volume explores the key issues, debates and questions in the metaphysics of logic. The book is structured in three parts, looking first at the main positions in the nature of logic, such as realism, pluralism, relativism, objectivity, nihilism, conceptualism, and conventionalism, then focusing on historical topics such as the medieval Aristotelian view of logic, the problem of universals, and Bolzano's logical realism. The final section tackles specific issues such as Glutty theories, contradiction, the metaphysical conception of logical truth, and the possible revision of logic. The volume will provide readers with a rich and wide-ranging survey, a valuable digest of the many views in this area, and a long overdue investigation of logic's relationship to us and the world. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students of philosophy, logic, and mathematics.
Originally published in 1932, this book presents a comprehensive study regarding the life and works of Peter Abelard. The text reflects the renewed interest in medieval thought at the time of publication, incorporating ideas from a broad variety of perspectives. A preface is included by the renowned theologian and biblical scholar Alexander Nairne. Detailed notes, appendices and a bibliography are also contained. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic, medieval philosophy and theology. |
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