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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Now in a new edition --the classic presentation of the theory of
computable functions in the context of the foundations of
mathematics. Part I motivates the study of computability with
discussions and readings about the crisis in the foundations of
mathematics in the early 20th century, while presenting the basic
ideas of whole number, function, proof, and real number. Part II
starts with readings from Turing and Post leading to the formal
theory of recursive functions. Part III presents sufficient formal
logic to give a full development of G del's incompleteness
theorems. Part IV considers the significance of the technical work
with a discussion of Church's Thesis and readings on the
foundations of mathematics. This new edition contains the timeline
"Computability and Undecidability" as well as the essay "On
mathematics."
This volume is a collection of essays in honour of Professor
Mohammad Ardeshir. It examines topics which, in one way or another,
are connected to the various aspects of his multidisciplinary
research interests. Based on this criterion, the book is divided
into three general categories. The first category includes papers
on non-classical logics, including intuitionistic logic,
constructive logic, basic logic, and substructural logic. The
second category is made up of papers discussing issues in the
contemporary philosophy of mathematics and logic. The third
category contains papers on Avicenna's logic and philosophy.
Mohammad Ardeshir is a full professor of mathematical logic at the
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Sharif University of
Technology, Tehran, Iran, where he has taught generations of
students for around a quarter century. Mohammad Ardeshir is known
in the first place for his prominent works in basic logic and
constructive mathematics. His areas of interest are however much
broader and include topics in intuitionistic philosophy of
mathematics and Arabic philosophy of logic and mathematics. In
addition to numerous research articles in leading international
journals, Ardeshir is the author of a highly praised Persian
textbook in mathematical logic. Partly through his writings and
translations, the school of mathematical intuitionism was
introduced to the Iranian academic community.
This book is a tribute to Professor Ewa Orlowska, a Polish logician
who was celebrating the 60th year of her scientific career in 2017.
It offers a collection of contributed papers by different authors
and covers the most important areas of her research. Prof. Orlowska
made significant contributions to many fields of logic, such as
proof theory, algebraic methods in logic and knowledge
representation, and her work has been published in 3 monographs and
over 100 articles in internationally acclaimed journals and
conference proceedings. The book also includes Prof. Orlowska's
autobiography, bibliography and a trialogue between her and the
editors of the volume, as well as contributors' biographical notes,
and is suitable for scholars and students of logic who are
interested in understanding more about Prof. Orlowska's work.
Contents: Introduction; I. ONTOLOGY; 1. Existence (1987); 2.
Nonexistence (1998); 3. Mythical Objects (2002); II. NECESSITY; 4.
Modal Logic Kalish-and-Montague Style (1994); 5. Impossible Worlds
(1984); 6. An Empire of Thin Air (1988); 7. The Logic of What Might
Have Been (1989); III. IDENTITY; 8. The fact that x=y (1987); 9.
This Side of Paradox (1993); 10. Identity Facts (2003); 11.
Personal Identity: What's the Problem? (1995); IV. PHILOSOPHY OF
MATHEMATICS; 12. Wholes, Parts, and Numbers (1997); 13. The Limits
of Human Mathematics (2001); V. THEORY OF MEANING AND REFERENCE;
14. On Content (1992); 15. On Designating (1997); 16. A Problem in
the Frege-Church Theory of Sense and Denotation (1993); 17. The
Very Possibility of Language (2001); 18. Tense and Intension
(2003); 19. Pronouns as Variables (2005)
This volume is the first extensive study of the historical and
philosophical connections between technology and mathematics.
Coverage includes the use of mathematics in ancient as well as
modern technology, devices and machines for computation,
cryptology, mathematics in technological education, the
epistemology of computer-mediated proofs, and the relationship
between technological and mathematical computability. The book also
examines the work of such historical figures as Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing.
This book presents the state of the art in the fields of formal
logic pioneered by Graham Priest. It includes advanced technical
work on the model and proof theories of paraconsistent logic, in
contributions from top scholars in the field. Graham Priest's
research has had a considerable influence on the field of
philosophical logic, especially with respect to the themes of
dialetheism-the thesis that there exist true but inconsistent
sentences-and paraconsistency-an account of deduction in which
contradictory premises do not entail the truth of arbitrary
sentences. Priest's work has regularly challenged researchers to
reappraise many assumptions about rationality, ontology, and truth.
This book collects original research by some of the most esteemed
scholars working in philosophical logic, whose contributions
explore and appraise Priest's work on logical approaches to
problems in philosophy, linguistics, computation, and mathematics.
They provide fresh analyses, critiques, and applications of
Priest's work and attest to its continued relevance and topicality.
The book also includes Priest's responses to the contributors,
providing a further layer to the development of these themes .
The present volume has its origin in a meeting of philosophers,
linguists and cognitive scientists that was held at Umea
University, Sweden, September 24-26, 1993. The meeting was
organized by the Department of Philosophy in co-opersation with the
Department of Linguistics, and it was called UmLLI-93, the Umea
Colloquium on Dynamic Approaches in Logic, Language and
Information. The papers included here fall into three broad
categories. In the first part of the book, Action, are collected
papers that concern the formal theory of action, the logic of
norms, and the theory of rational decision. The papers in the
second part, Belief Change, concern the theory of belief dynamics
in the tradition of Alchourron, Gardenfors and Makinson. The third
part, Cognition, concerns abstract questions about knowledge and
truth as well as more concrete questions about the usefulness and
tractability of various graphic representations of information.
Strong reasoning skills are an important aspect to cultivate in
life, as they directly impact decision making on a daily basis. By
examining the different ways the world views logic and order, new
methods and techniques can be employed to help expand on this skill
further in the future. Philosophical Perceptions on Logic and Order
is a pivotal scholarly resource that discusses the evolution of
logical reasoning and future applications for these types of
processes. Highlighting relevant topics including logic patterns,
deductive logic, and inductive logic, this publication is an ideal
reference source for academicians, students, and researchers that
would like to expand their understanding of how society currently
employs the use of logical reasoning techniques.
This volume examines the entire logical and philosophical
production of Nicolai A. Vasil'ev, studying his life and activities
as a historian and man of letters. Readers will gain a
comprehensive understanding of this influential Russian logician,
philosopher, psychologist, and poet. The author frames Vasil'ev's
work within its historical and cultural context. He takes into
consideration both the situation of logic in Russia and the state
of logic in Western Europe, from the end of the 19th century to the
beginning of the 20th. Following this, the book considers the
attempts to develop non-Aristotelian logics or ideas that present
affinities with imaginary logic. It then looks at the contribution
of traditional logic in elaborating non-classical ideas. This logic
allows the author to deal with incomplete objects just as imaginary
logic does with contradictory ones. Both logics are objects of
interesting analysis by modern researchers. This volume will appeal
to graduate students and scholars interested not only in Vasil'ev's
work, but also in the history of non-classical logics.
Many systems of logic diagrams have been offered both historically
and more recently. Each of them has clear limitations. An original
alternative system is offered here. It is simpler, more natural,
and more expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to
analyze not only syllogisms but arguments involving relational
terms and unanalyzed statement terms.
Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-71) is best remembered for both his
compendious "History of Philosophy" and his "System of Logic", both
of which went through several editions in the original German. It
was the latter's remarkable popularity as a textbook in Germany
that led Lindsay to translate it to fill a gap in the English
market. As well as incorporating the most up-to-date revisions and
additons to the German edition he inserted the opinions of the more
important English logicians. As such this is a valuable textbook
for the understanding of logic systems as taught in England and
Germany before symbolic logic was a formal and distinct discipline.
Published in honor of Sergio Galvan, this collection concentrates
on the application of logical and mathematical methods for the
study of central issues in formal philosophy. The volume is
subdivided into four sections, dedicated to logic and philosophy of
logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science,
metaphysics and philosophy of religion. The contributions adress,
from a logical point of view, some of the main topics in these
areas. The first two sections include formal treatments of: truth
and paradoxes; definitions by abstraction; the status of abstract
objects, such as mathematical objects and universal concepts; and
the structure of explicit knowledge. The last two sections include
papers on classical problems in philosophy of science, such as the
status of subjective probability, the notion of verisimilitude, the
notion of approximation, and the theory of mind and mental
causation, and specific issues in metaphysics and philosophy of
religion, such as the ontology of species, actions, and
intelligible worlds, and the logic of religious belonging.
Ordinal Computability discusses models of computation obtained by
generalizing classical models, such as Turing machines or register
machines, to transfinite working time and space. In particular,
recognizability, randomness, and applications to other areas of
mathematics are covered.
The aim of this volume is to collect original contributions by the
best specialists from the area of proof theory, constructivity, and
computation and discuss recent trends and results in these areas.
Some emphasis will be put on ordinal analysis, reductive proof
theory, explicit mathematics and type-theoretic formalisms, and
abstract computations. The volume is dedicated to the 60th birthday
of Professor Gerhard Jager, who has been instrumental in shaping
and promoting logic in Switzerland for the last 25 years. It
comprises contributions from the symposium "Advances in Proof
Theory", which was held in Bern in December 2013. Proof theory came
into being in the twenties of the last century, when it was
inaugurated by David Hilbert in order to secure the foundations of
mathematics. It was substantially influenced by Goedel's famous
incompleteness theorems of 1930 and Gentzen's new consistency proof
for the axiom system of first order number theory in 1936. Today,
proof theory is a well-established branch of mathematical and
philosophical logic and one of the pillars of the foundations of
mathematics. Proof theory explores constructive and computational
aspects of mathematical reasoning; it is particularly suitable for
dealing with various questions in computer science.
This volume collects the most important articles on the metaphysics of modality by noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga. The book chronicles Plantinga's thought from the late 1960's to the present. Plantinga is here concerned with fundamental issues in metaphysics: what is the nature of abstract objects like possible worlds,properties, propositions, and such phenomena? Are there possible but non-actual objects? Can objects that do not exist exemplify properties? In this thorough and searching book, Plantinga addresses these and many other questions that continue to preoccupy philosophers in the field. This volume contains some of the best work in metaphysics from the past 30 years, and will remain a source of critical contention and keen interest among philosophers of metaphysics and philosophical logic for years to come.
This book provides a general survey of the main concepts, questions
and results that have been developed in the recent interactions
between quantum information, quantum computation and logic. Divided
into 10 chapters, the books starts with an introduction of the main
concepts of the quantum-theoretic formalism used in quantum
information. It then gives a synthetic presentation of the main
"mathematical characters" of the quantum computational game:
qubits, quregisters, mixtures of quregisters, quantum logical
gates. Next, the book investigates the puzzling
entanglement-phenomena and logically analyses the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and introduces the reader to
quantum computational logics, and new forms of quantum logic. The
middle chapters investigate the possibility of a quantum
computational semantics for a language that can express sentences
like "Alice knows that everybody knows that she is pretty", explore
the mathematical concept of quantum Turing machine, and illustrate
some characteristic examples that arise in the framework of musical
languages. The book concludes with an analysis of recent
discussions, and contains a Mathematical Appendix which is a survey
of the definitions of all main mathematical concepts used in the
book.
From Concept to Objectivity uncovers the nature and authority of
conceptual determination by critically thinking through neglected
arguments in Hegel's Science of Logic pivotal for understanding
reason and its role in philosophy. Winfield clarifies the logical
problems of presuppositionlessness and determinacy that prepare the
way for conceiving the concept, examines how universality,
particularity, and individuality are determined, investigates how
judgment and syllogism are exhaustively differentiated, and, on
that basis, explores how objectivity can be categorized without
casting thought in irrevocable opposition to reality. Winfield's
book will be of interest to readers of Hegel as well as anyone
wondering how thought can be objective.
Barry Taylor's book mounts an argument against one of the
fundamental tenets of much contemporary philosophy, the idea that
we can make sense of reality as existing objectively, independently
of our capacities to come to know it. Part One sets the scene by
arguings that traditional realism can be explicated as a doctrine
about truth - that truth is objective, that is, public, bivalent,
and epistemically independent. Part Two, the centrepiece of the
book, shows how a form of Hilary Putnam's model-theoretic argument
demonstrates that no such notion of truth can be founded on the
idea of correspondence, as explained in model-theoretic terms (more
traditional accounts of correspondence having been already disposed
of in Part One). Part Three argues that non-correspondence accounts
of truth - truth as superassertibility or idealized rational
acceptability, formal conceptions of truth, Tarskian truth - also
fail to meet the criteria for objectivity; along the way, it also
dismisses the claims of the latterday views of Putnam, and of
similar views articulated by John McDowell, to constitute a new,
less traditional form of realism. In the Coda, Taylor bolsters some
of the considerations advanced in Part Three in evaluating formal
conceptions of truth, by assessing and rejecting the claims of
Robert Brandom to have combined such an account of truth with a
satisfactory account of semantic structure. He concludes that there
is no defensible notion of truth which preserves the theses of
traditional realism, nor any extant position sufficiently true to
the ideals of that doctrine to inherit its title. So the only
question remaining is which form of antirealism to adopt.
Aristotle's Topics is a handbook for dialectic, which can be
understood as a philosophical debate between a questioner and a
respondent. In book 2, Aristotle mainly develops strategies for
making deductions about 'accidents', which are properties that
might or might not belong to a subject (for instance, Socrates has
five fingers, but might have had six), and about properties that
simply belong to a subject without further specification. In the
present commentary, here translated into English for the first
time, Alexander develops a careful study of Aristotle's text. He
preserves objections and replies from other philosophers whose work
is now lost, such as the Stoics. He also offers an invaluable
picture of the tradition of Aristotelian logic down to his time,
including innovative attempts to unify Aristotle's guidance for
dialectic with his general theory of deductive argument (the
syllogism), found in the Analytics. The work will be of interest
not only for its perspective on ancient logic, rhetoric, and
debate, but also for its continuing influence on argument in the
Middle Ages and later.
Kit Fine has since the 1970s been one of the leading contributors
to work at the intersection of logic and metaphysics. This is his
eagerly-awaited first book in the area. It draws together a series
of essays, three of them previously unpublished, on possibility,
necessity, and tense. These puzzling aspects of the way the world
is have been the focus of considerable philosophical attention in
recent decades. Fine gives here the definitive exposition and
defence of certain positions for which he is well known: the
intelligibility of modality de re; the primitiveness of the modal;
and the primacy of the actual over the possible. But the book also
argues for several positions that are not so familiar: the
existence of distinctive forms of natural and normative necessity,
not reducible to any form of metaphysical necessity; the need to
make a distinction between the worldly and the unworldly, analogous
to the distinction between the tensed and the tenseless; and the
viability of a non-standard form of realism about tense, which
recognizes the tensed character of reality without conceding that
there is any privileged standpoint from which it is to be viewed.
Modality and Tense covers a wide range of topics from many
different areas: the possible-worlds analysis of counterfactuals;
the compatibility of special relativity with presentism; the
implications of ethical naturalism; and the nature of
first-personal experience. A helpful introduction orients the
reader and offers a way into some of the most original work in
contemporary philosophy.
This contributed volume explores the ways logical skills have been
perceived over the course of history. The authors approach the
topic from the lenses of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and
history to examine two opposing perceptions of logic: the first as
an innate human ability and the second as a skill that can be
learned and mastered. Chapters focus on the social and political
dynamics of the use of logic throughout history, utilizing case
studies and critical analyses. Specific topics covered include: the
rise of logical skills problems concerning medieval notions of
idiocy and rationality decolonizing natural logic natural logic and
the course of time Logical Skills: Social-Historical Perspectives
will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as
researchers in the fields of history, sociology, philosophy, and
logic. Psychology and colonial studies scholars will also find this
volume to be of particular interest.
A comprehensive philosophical introduction to set theory. Anyone
wishing to work on the logical foundations of mathematics must
understand set theory, which lies at its heart. Potter offers a
thorough account of cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, and the
various axiom candidates. He discusses in detail the project of
set-theoretic reduction, which aims to interpret the rest of
mathematics in terms of set theory. The key question here is how to
deal with the paradoxes that bedevil set theory. Potter offers a
strikingly simple version of the most widely accepted response to
the paradoxes, which classifies sets by means of a hierarchy of
levels. What makes the book unique is that it interweaves a careful
presentation of the technical material with a penetrating
philosophical critique. Potter does not merely expound the theory
dogmatically but at every stage discusses in detail the reasons
that can be offered for believing it to be true.
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