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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
The Logic Manual is a clear and concise introduction to logic for
beginning philosophy students. It offers a complete introductory
course, guiding the reader carefully through the topics in logic
that are most important for the study of philosophy. It covers
propositional and predicate logic with and without identity. It
includes an account of the semantics of these languages including
definitions of truth and satisfaction. Natural deduction is used as
a proof system. Volker Halbach introduces the essential concepts
through examples and informal explanations as well as through
abstract definitions.
The Logic Manual provides the best entry to the general abstract
way of thinking about language, logic, and semantics which is
characteristic of contemporary philosophy. Exercises, examples, and
sample examination papers are provided on an accompanying website.
Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about
them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation
conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for
example, and they appear to move independently of a background of
other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody
Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows
what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it
is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location
and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of
them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be,
aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere
metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about
constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as
contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown
that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties,
which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd
abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections.
Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that
makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic
objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic
("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni
shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier
domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical
ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus
makes sense of our speaking about a host of items-Mickey Mouse,
unicorns, Martians-that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed
by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological
debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates
that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns,
without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological
commitments onto speakers that they don't have.
Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to
many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems
presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are
made using intensional transitive verbs such as "want," "seek,"
"imagine," and "worship." Forbes offers a theory of how such verbs
work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics,
philosophy of language, and aesthetics.
Between Saying and Doing aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its
classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic
philosophy. It investigates the relations between the meaning of
linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to
what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and
to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings, makes it
possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the
theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts)
and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among
meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose
interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical,
indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the
argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classic analytic
core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are
offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial
intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations
between subjects and objects.
The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility,
and related notions--are they objective features of
mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal
facts be explained in other terms? This volume presents new work on
modality by established leaders in the field and by up-and-coming
philosophers. Between them, the papers address fundamental
questions concerning realism and anti-realism about modality, the
nature and basis of facts about what is possible and what is
necessary, the nature of modal knowledge, modal logic and its
relations to necessary existence and to counterfactual reasoning.
The general introduction locates the individual contributions in
the wider context of the contemporary discussion of the metaphysics
and epistemology of modality.
Wittgenstein's philosophical career began in 1911 when he went to
Cambridge to work with Russell. He compiled the Notes on Logic two
years later as a kind of summary of the work he had done so far.
Russell thought that they were "as good as anything that has ever
been done in logic," but he had Wittgenstein himself to explain
them to him. Without the benefit of Wittgenstein's explanations,
most later scholars have preferred to treat the Notes solely as an
interpretative aid in understanding the Tractatus (which draws on
them for material), rather than as a philosophical work in their
own right.
Michael Potter unequivocally demonstrates the philosophical and
historical importance of the Notes for the first time. By teasing
out the meaning of key passages, he shows how many of the most
important insights in the Tractatus they contain. He discusses in
detail how Wittgenstein arrived at these insights by thinking
through ideas he obtained from Russell and Frege. And he uses a
challenging blend of biography and philosophy to illuminate the
methods Wittgenstein used in his work.
The book features the complete text of the Notesi in a critical
edition, with a detailed discussion of the circumstances in which
they were compiled, leading to a new understanding of how they
should be read.
This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the
different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic
jurisprudence as qiyas. According to the authors' view, qiyas
represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical
reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into
legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common
and Civil Law) but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for
parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of
problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the
standard forms of analogical reasoning studied in contemporary
philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview
of the emergence of qiyas and of the work of al-Shirazi penned by
Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shirazi's classification of
correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiyas
al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system
of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiyas
al-dalala, qiyas al-shabah). The third part develops the main
theoretical background of the authors' work, namely, the dialogical
approach to Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory. The authors
present this in a general form and independently of adaptations
deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on
the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been
extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book
concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to
analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in
general.
Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, or Basic Laws of
Arithmetic, was intended to be his magnum opus, the book in which
he would finally establish his logicist philosophy of arithmetic.
But because of the disaster of Russell's Paradox, which undermined
Frege's proofs, the more mathematical parts of the book have rarely
been read. Richard G. Heck, Jr., aims to change that, and establish
it as a neglected masterpiece that must be placed at the center of
Frege's philosophy. Part I of Reading Frege's Grundgesetze develops
an interpretation of the philosophy of logic that informs
Grundgesetze, paying especially close attention to the difficult
sections of Frege's book in which he discusses his notorious 'Basic
Law V' and attempts to secure its status as a law of logic. Part II
examines the mathematical basis of Frege's logicism, explaining and
exploring Frege's formal arguments. Heck argues that Frege himself
knew that his proofs could be reconstructed so as to avoid
Russell's Paradox, and presents Frege's arguments in a way that
makes them available to a wide audience. He shows, by example, that
careful attention to the structure of Frege's arguments, to what he
proved, to how he proved it, and even to what he tried to prove but
could not, has much to teach us about Frege's philosophy.
Syllogism is a form of logical argument allowing one to deduce a
consistent conclusion based on a pair of premises having a common
term. Although Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop this
way of reasoning, he left open a lot of conceptual space for
further modifications, improvements and systematizations with
regards to his original syllogistic theory. From its creation until
modern times, syllogism has remained a powerful and compelling
device of deduction and argument, used by a variety of figures and
assuming a variety of forms throughout history. The Aftermath of
Syllogism investigates the key developments in the history of this
peculiar pattern of inference, from Avicenna to Hegel. Taking as
its focus the longue duree of development between the Middle Ages
and the nineteenth century, this book looks at the huge reworking
scientific syllogism underwent over the centuries, as some of the
finest philosophical minds brought it to an unprecedented height of
logical sharpness and sophistication. Bringing together a group of
major international experts in the Aristotelian tradition, The
Aftermath of Syllogism provides a detailed, up to date and critical
evaluation of the history of syllogistic deduction.
With the publication of the present volume, the Handbook of the
History of Logic turns its attention to the rise of modern logic.
The period covered is 1685-1900, with this volume carving out the
territory from Leibniz to Frege. What is striking about this period
is the earliness and persistence of what could be called 'the
mathematical turn in logic'. Virtually every working logician is
aware that, after a centuries-long run, the logic that originated
in antiquity came to be displaced by a new approach with a
dominantly mathematical character. It is, however, a substantial
error to suppose that the mathematization of logic was, in all
essentials, Frege's accomplishment or, if not his alone, a
development ensuing from the second half of the nineteenth century.
The mathematical turn in logic, although given considerable torque
by events of the nineteenth century, can with assurance be dated
from the final quarter of the seventeenth century in the
impressively prescient work of Leibniz. It is true that, in the
three hundred year run-up to the Begriffsschrift, one does not see
a smoothly continuous evolution of the mathematical turn, but the
idea that logic is mathematics, albeit perhaps only the most
general part of mathematics, is one that attracted some degree of
support throughout the entire period in question. Still, as Alfred
North Whitehead once noted, the relationship between mathematics
and symbolic logic has been an "uneasy" one, as is the present-day
association of mathematics with computing. Some of this unease has
a philosophical texture. For example, those who equate mathematics
and logic sometimes disagree about the directionality of the
purported identity. Frege and Russell made themselves famous by
insisting (though for different reasons) that logic was the senior
partner. Indeed logicism is the view that mathematics can be
re-expressed without relevant loss in a suitably framed symbolic
logic. But for a number of thinkers who took an algebraic approach
to logic, the dependency relation was reversed, with mathematics in
some form emerging as the senior partner. This was the precursor of
the modern view that, in its four main precincts (set theory, proof
theory, model theory and recursion theory), logic is indeed a
branch of pure mathematics. It would be a mistake to leave the
impression that the mathematization of logic (or the logicization
of mathematics) was the sole concern of the history of logic
between 1665 and 1900. There are, in this long interval, aspects of
the modern unfolding of logic that bear no stamp of the imperial
designs of mathematicians, as the chapters on Kant and Hegcl make
clear. Of the two, Hcgel's influence on logic is arguably the
greater, serving as a spur to the unfolding of an idealist
tradition in logic - a development that will be covered in a
further volume, British Logic in the Nineteenth Century.
"An Introduction to the History of Philosophical and Formal Logic"
introduces ideas and thinkers central to the development of
philosophical and formal logic. From its Aristotelian origins to
the present-day arguments, logic is broken down into four main time
periods: -Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Aristotle and The Stoics)
-The early modern period (Leibniz, Bolzano, Boole) -High modern
period (Frege, Peano & Russell and Hilbert)-Early 20th century:
(Godel and Tarski) Each new time frame begins with an introductory
overview highlighting themes and points of importance. Chapters
discuss the significance and reception of influential works and
look at historical arguments in the context of contemporary
debates. To support independent study, comprehensive lists of
primary and secondary reading are included at the end of chapters,
along with exercises and discussion questions.By clearly presenting
and explaining the changes to logic across the history of
philosophy, "An Introduction to the History of Philosophical and
Formal Logic" constructs an easy-to-follow narrative. This is an
ideal starting point for students looking to understand the
historical development of logic.
This comprehensive text shows how various notions of logic can be viewed as notions of universal algebra providing more advanced concepts for those who have an introductory knowledge of algebraic logic, as well as those wishing to delve into more theoretical aspects.
The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a
crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical
reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical
illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations
between them.
G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert, 'I went to the
pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be
'absurd'. Moore calls it a 'paradox' that this absurdity persists
despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Over
half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers
and other students of language, logic, and cognition. Ludwig
Wittgenstein was fascinated by Moore's example, and the absurdity
of Moore's saying was intensively discussed in the mid-20th
century. Yet the source of the absurdity has remained elusive, and
its recalcitrance has led researchers in recent decades to address
it with greater care. In this definitive treatment of the problem
of Moorean absurdity Green and Williams survey the history and
relevance of the paradox and leading approaches to resolving it,
and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area.
Contributors Jonathan Adler, Bradley Armour-Garb, Jay D. Atlas,
Thomas Baldwin, Claudio de Almeida, Andre Gallois, Robert Gordon,
Mitchell Green, Alan Hajek, Roy Sorensen, John Williams
What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this
question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a
single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More
recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all;
the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In
this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should
reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional
property. To understand truth we must understand what it does, its
function in our cognitive economy. Once we understand that, we'll
see that this function can be performed in more than one way. And
that in turn opens the door to an appealing pluralism: beliefs
about the concrete physical world needn't be true in the same way
as our thoughts about matters -- like morality -- where the human
stain is deepest.
This book offers insight into the nature of meaningful discourse.
It presents an argument of great intellectual scope written by an
author with more than four decades of experience. Readers will gain
a deeper understanding into three theories of the logos: analytic,
dialectical, and oceanic. The author first introduces and contrasts
these three theories. He then assesses them with respect to their
basic parameters: necessity, truth, negation, infinity, as well as
their use in mathematics. Analytic Aristotelian logic has
traditionally claimed uniqueness, most recently in its Fregean and
post-Fregean variants. Dialectical logic was first proposed by
Hegel. The account presented here cuts through the dense, often
incomprehensible Hegelian text. Oceanic logic was never identified
as such, but the author gives numerous examples of its use from the
history of philosophy. The final chapter addresses the plurality of
the three theories and of how we should deal with it. The author
first worked in analytic logic in the 1970s and 1980s, first
researched dialectical logic in the 1990s, and discovered oceanic
logic in the 2000s. This book represents the culmination of
reflections that have lasted an entire scholarly career.
Reference is a central topic in philosophy of language, and has
been the main focus of discussion about how language relates to the
world. R. M. Sainsbury sets out a new approach to the concept,
which promises to bring to an end some long-standing debates in
semantic theory. There is a single category of referring
expressions, all of which deserve essentially the same kind of
semantic treatment. Included in this category are both singular and
plural referring expressions ('Aristotle', 'The Pleiades'), complex
and non-complex referring expressions ('The President of the USA in
1970', 'Nixon'), and empty and non-empty referring expressions
('Vulcan', 'Neptune'). Referring expressions are to be described
semantically by a reference condition, rather than by being
associated with a referent. In arguing for these theses,
Sainsbury's book promises to end the fruitless oscillation between
Millian and descriptivist views. Millian views insist that every
name has a referent, and find it hard to give a good account of
names which appear not to have referents, or at least are not known
to do so, like ones introduced through error ('Vulcan'), ones where
it is disputed whether they have a bearer ('Patanjali') and ones
used in fiction. Descriptivist theories require that each name be
associated with some body of information. These theories fly in the
face of the fact names are useful precisely because there is often
no overlap of information among speakers and hearers. The
alternative position for which the book argues is firmly
non-descriptivist, though it also does not require a referent. A
much broader view can be taken of which expressions are referring
expressions: not just names and pronouns used demonstratively, but
also some complex expressions and some anaphoric uses of pronouns.
Sainsbury's approach brings reference into line with truth: no one
would think that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with
a truth value, but it is commonly held that a semantic theory
should associate a sentence with a truth condition, a condition
which an arbitrary state of the world would have to satisfy in
order to make the sentence true. The right analogy is that a
semantic theory should associate a referring expression with a
reference condition, a condition which an arbitrary object would
have to satisfy in order to be the expression's referent. Lucid and
accessible, and written with a minimum of technicality, Sainsbury's
book also includes a useful historical survey. It will be of
interest to those working in logic, mind, and metaphysics as well
as essential reading for philosophers of language.
This is a guide to the thought and ideas of Gottlob Frege, one of
the most important but also perplexing figures in the history of
analytic philosophy. Gottlob Frege is regarded as one of the
founders of modern logic and analytic philosophy, indeed as the
greatest innovator in logic since Aristotle. His groundbreaking
work identified many of the basic conceptions and distinctions that
later came to dominate analytic philosophy. The literature on him
is legion and ever-growing in complexity, representing a
considerable challenge to the non-expert. The details of his logic,
which have come into focus in recent research, are particularly
difficult to grasp, although they are crucial to the development of
his grand project, the reduction of arithmetic to logic, and the
associated philosophical innovations. This book offers a lucid and
accessible introduction to Frege's logic, taking the reader
directly to the core of his philosophy, and ultimately to some of
the most pertinent issues in contemporary philosophy of language,
logic, mathematics, and the mind. "Continuum's Guides for the
Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to
thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find
especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering.
Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject
difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and
ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of
demanding material.
Frege's Theorem collects eleven essays by Richard G Heck, Jr, one
of the world's leading authorities on Frege's philosophy. The
Theorem is the central contribution of Gottlob Frege's formal work
on arithmetic. It tells us that the axioms of arithmetic can be
derived, purely logically, from a single principle: the number of
these things is the same as the number of those things just in case
these can be matched up one-to-one with those. But that principle
seems so utterly fundamental to thought about number that it might
almost count as a definition of number. If so, Frege's Theorem
shows that arithmetic follows, purely logically, from a near
definition. As Crispin Wright was the first to make clear, that
means that Frege's logicism, long thought dead, might yet be
viable.
Heck probes the philosophical significance of the Theorem, using it
to launch and then guide a wide-ranging exploration of historical,
philosophical, and technical issues in the philosophy of
mathematics and logic, and of their connections with metaphysics,
epistemology, the philosophy of language and mind, and even
developmental psychology. The book begins with an overview that
introduces the Theorem and the issues surrounding it, and explores
how the essays that follow contribute to our understanding of those
issues. There are also new postscripts to five of the essays, which
discuss changes of mind, respond to published criticisms, and
advance the discussion yet further.
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