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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Logic is of course a general resource for reasoning at large. But
in the first half of the twentieth century, it developed
particularity with a view to mathematical applications, and the
field of mathematical logic came into being and flourished. In the
second half of the century, much the same happened with regard to
philosophical applications. Hence philosophical logic. The
deliberations of this book cover a varied but interrelated array of
key issues in the field. They address the representation of
information in linguistic formulation, and modes of cogent
demonstration in logic, mathematics, and empirical investigation,
as well as the role of logic in philosophical deliberations.
Overall, the book seeks to demonstrate and illustrate the utility
of logic as a productive resource for rational inquiry at large.
In 1945 Alonzo Church issued a pair of referee reports in which he
anonymously conveyed to Frederic Fitch a surprising proof showing
that wherever there is (empirical) ignorance there is also
logically unknowable truth. Fitch published this and a
generalization of the result in 1963. Ever since, philosophers have
been attempting to understand the significance and address the
counter-intuitiveness of this, the so-called paradox of
knowability.
This collection assembles Church's referee reports, Fitch's 1963
paper, and nineteen new papers on the knowability paradox. The
contributors include logicians and philosophers from three
continents, many of whom have already made important contributions
to the discussion of the problem. The volume contains a general
introduction to the paradox and the background literature, and is
divided into seven sections that roughly mark the central points of
debate. The sections include the history of the paradox, Michael
Dummett's constructivism, issues of paraconsistency, developments
of modal and temporal logics, Cartesian restricted theories of
truth, modal and mathematical fictionalism, and reconsiderations
about how, and whether, we ought to construe an anti-realist theory
of truth.
The content of the volume is divided as follows: after presenting
two rival approaches to substantiality and causality: a traditional
(ontological) view vs. a transcendental one (Rosiak) there follow
two sections: the first presents studies of substance as showing
some causal aspects (Buchheim, Keinanen, Kovac, Piwowarczyk),
whereas the other contains investigations of causality showing in a
way its reference to the category of substance (Kobiela, Meixner,
Mitscherling, Wronski). The last, short section contains two
studies of extension (Leszczynski and Skowron) which can be
regarded as a conceptual background of both substantiality and
causality. The book gives a very colourful picture of the
discussions connected with substantiality and causality which may
be of potential interest for the readers.
For centuries debates about reason and its Other have animated and
informed philosophy, art, science and politics throughout Western
civilization - but nowhere, arguably as deeply and turbulently as
in Germany. Reason, the legacy of the Enlightenment, has been
claimed, rejected and redefined by influential German thinkers from
Kant to Nietzsche to Habermas. In our own time - more than 200
years after Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - the status of reason
and the irrational, what is and what should be excluded from
reason, what qualifies as a critique of reason, are all still
central philosophical issues in Germany as well as throughout the
West.
This collection of papers, published in honour of Hector J.
Levesque on the occasion of his 60th birthday, addresses a number
of core areas in the field of knowledge representation and
reasoning. In a broad sense, the book is about knowledge and
belief, tractable reasoning, and reasoning about action and change.
More specifically, the book contains contributions to Description
Logics, the expressiveness of knowledge representation languages,
limited forms of inference, satisfiablity (SAT), the logical
foundations of BDI architectures, only-knowing, belief revision,
planning, causation, the situation calculus, the action language
Golog, and cognitive robotics.
John Horty effectively develops deontic logic (the logic of ethical concepts like obligation and permission) against the background of a formal theory of agency. He incorporates certain elements of decision theory to set out a new deontic account of what agents ought to do under various conditions over extended periods of time. Offering a conceptual rather than technical emphasis, Horty's framework allows a number of recent issues from moral theory to be set out clearly and discussed from a uniform point of view.
In recent years, mathematical logic has developed in many
directions, the initial unity of its subject matter giving way to a
myriad of seemingly unrelated areas. The articles collected here,
which range from historical scholarship to recent research in
geometric model theory, squarely address this development. These
articles also connect to the diverse work of Vaananen, whose
ecumenical approach to logic reflects the unity of the discipline."
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The Enchiridion
(Hardcover)
Epictetus; Translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson; Edited by Tony Darnell
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Kevin Scharp proposes an original theory of the nature and logic of
truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be
replaced for certain theoretical purposes. Replacing Truth opens
with an overview of work on the nature of truth (e.g.,
correspondence theories, deflationism), work on the liar and
related paradoxes, and a comprehensive scheme for combining these
two literatures into a unified study of the concept truth. Scharp
argues that truth is best understood as an inconsistent concept,
and proposes a detailed theory of inconsistent concepts that can be
applied to the case of truth. Truth also happens to be a useful
concept, but its inconsistency inhibits its utility; as such, it
should be replaced with consistent concepts that can do truth's job
without giving rise to paradoxes. To this end, Scharp offers a pair
of replacements, which he dubs ascending truth and descending
truth, along with an axiomatic theory of them and a new kind of
possible-worlds semantics for this theory. As for the nature of
truth, he goes on to develop Davidson's idea that it is best
understood as the core of a measurement system for rational
phenomena (e.g., belief, desire, and meaning). The book finishes
with a semantic theory that treats truth predicates as
assessment-sensitive (i.e., their extension is relative to a
context of assessment), and a demonstration of how this theory
solves the problems posed by the liar and other paradoxes.
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
Tyler Burge presents a collection of his seminal essays on Gottlob
Frege (1848-1925), who has a strong claim to be seen as the founder
of modern analytic philosophy, and whose work remains at the centre
of philosophical debate today. Truth, Thought, Reason gathers some
of Burge's most influential work from the last twenty-five years,
and also features important new material, including a substantial
introduction and postscripts to four of the ten papers. It will be
an essential resource for any historian of modern philosophy, and
for anyone working on philosophy of language, epistemology, or
philosophical logic.
This volume responds to and reassesses the work of Hector-Neri
Castaneda (1924-1991). The essays collected here, written by his
students, followers, and opponents, examine Castaneda s seminal
views on deontic logic, metaethics, indedicality, praticitions,
fictions, and metaphysics, utilizing the critical viewpoint
afforded by time, as well as new data, to offer insights on his
theories and methodology."
The Logical Must is an examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein's
philosophy of logic, early and late, undertaken from an austere
naturalistic perspective Penelope Maddy has called "Second
Philosophy." The Second Philosopher is a humble but tireless
inquirer who begins her investigation of the world with ordinary
perceptual beliefs, moves from there to empirical generalizations,
then to deliberate experimentation, and eventually to theory
formation and confirmation. She takes this same approach to logical
truth, locating its ground in simple worldly structures and our
knowledge of it in our basic cognitive machinery, tuned by
evolutionary pressures to detect those structures where they occur.
In his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein also
links the logical structure of representation with the structure of
the world, but he includes one key unnaturalistic assumption: that
the sense of our representations must be given prior
to-independently of-facts about how the world is. When that
assumption is removed, the general outlines of the resulting
position come surprisingly close to the Second Philosopher's
roughly empirical account. In his later discussions of logic in
Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics, Wittgenstein also rejects this earlier assumption in
favor of a picture that arises in the wake of the famous
rule-following considerations. Here Wittgenstein and the Second
Philosopher operate in even closer harmony-locating the ground of
our logical practices in our interests, our natural inclinations
and abilities, and very general features of the world-until the
Second Philosopher moves to fill in the account with her empirical
investigations of the world and cognition. At this point,
Wittgenstein balks, but as a matter of personal animosity rather
than philosophical principle.
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.
In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full
panorama of Charles S. Peirce's most important late writings. Among
the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential
graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The
manuscripts from 1895-1913, with many of them being published here
for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of
his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to
reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the
conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic. This
first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical
development, theory and application of Peirce's graphical method
and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant
further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential
graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning
and mind.
Instance ontology, or particularism - the doctrine that asserts the
individuality of properties and relations - has been a persistent
topic in Western philosophy, discussed in works by Plato and
Aristotle, by Muslim and Christian scholastics, and by philosophers
of both realist and nominalist positions. This book by D. W. Mertz
is the first sustained analysis that applies the rules and systems
of mathematics and logic to instance ontology in order to argue for
its validity and for its problem-solving capacities and to
associate it with a version of the realist position that Mertz
calls "moderate realism". Mertz surveys the history of instance
ontology in writings from Plato and Aristotle through Leibniz,
followed by modern philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and D. M.
Armstrong, among others. He also includes a thorough critique of
the recent work of Keith Campbell and other contemporary
nominalists. Building on the insights gained through this
historical overview, he delves deeper into the logic of instance
ontology and uncovers some of its extraordinary problem-solving
features: distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate impredicative
reasoning; uniformly diagnosing the self-referential paradoxes;
being free from the limitation theorems of Godel and Tarski;
providing a basis for the derivation of arithmetic construed
intensionally; and formally distinguishing identity and
indiscernibility.
This volume opens up stimulating new perspectives on a broad
variety of Barcan Marcus's concerns ranging from the systematic
foundation and interpretation of quantified modal logic, nature of
extensionality, necessity of identity, direct reference theory for
proper names, notions of essentialism, second-order modal logic,
modal metaphysics, properties and classes, substitutional and
objectual quantification, actualism, the Barcan formula, possibilia
and possible-world semantics to epistemic and deontic modalities,
non-language-centered theories of belief, accounts of rationality,
consistency of a moral code, moral dilemmas, and much more. The
contributions demonstrate that Barcan Marcus's original and clear
ideas have had a formative influence on the direction in which
certain themes central to today's philosophical debate have
developed. Furthermore, the volume includes an illuminating
intellectual autobiography from Barcan Marcus herself as well as an
informal interview containing her unfiltered, frank answers. The
book brings together contributions by Ruth Barcan Marcus, Timothy
Williamson, Dagfinn Follesdal, Joelle Proust, Pascal Engel, Edgar
Morscher, Erik J. Olsson, and Michael Frauchiger.
Realizing Reason pursues three interrelated themes. First, it
traces the essential moments in the historical unfolding-from the
ancient Greeks, through Descartes, Kant, and developments in the
nineteenth century, to the present-that culminates in the
realization of pure reason as a power of knowing. Second, it
provides a cogent account of mathematical practice as a mode of
inquiry into objective truth. And finally, it develops and defends
a new conception of our being in the world, one that builds on and
transforms the now standard conception according to which our
experience of reality arises out of brain activity due, in part, to
merely causal impacts on our sense organs. Danielle Macbeth shows
that to achieve an adequate understanding of the striving for truth
in the exact sciences we must overcome this standard conception and
that the way to do that is through a more adequate understanding of
the nature of mathematical practice and the profound
transformations it has undergone over the course of its history,
the history through which reason is first realized as a power of
knowing. Because we can understand mathematical practice only if we
attend to the systems of written signs within which to do
mathematics, Macbeth provides an account of the nature and role of
written notations, specifically, of the principal systems that have
been developed within which to reason in mathematics: Euclidean
diagrams, the symbolic language of arithmetic and algebra, and
Frege's concept-script, Begriffsschrift.
Philosophical logic has been, and continues to be, a driving force
behind much progress and development in philosophy more broadly.
This collection by up-and-coming philosophical logicians deals with
a broad range of topics, including, for example, proof-theory,
probability, context-sensitivity, dialetheism and dynamic
semantics.
A new approach to reading Frege's notations that adheres to the
modern view that terms and well-formed formulas are any disjoint
syntactic categories. On this new approach, we can at last read
Frege's notations in their original form revealing striking new
solutions to many of the outstanding problems of interpreting his
philosophy.
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