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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
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.
Alain Badiou's Being and Event continues to impact philosophical
investigations into the question of Being. By exploring the central
role set theory plays in this influential work, Burhanuddin Baki
presents the first extended study of Badiou's use of mathematics in
Being and Event. Adopting a clear, straightforward approach, Baki
gathers together and explains the technical details of the relevant
high-level mathematics in Being and Event. He examines Badiou's
philosophical framework in close detail, showing exactly how it is
'conditioned' by the technical mathematics. Clarifying the relevant
details of Badiou's mathematics, Baki looks at the four core topics
Badiou employs from set theory: the formal axiomatic system of ZFC;
cardinal and ordinal numbers; Kurt Goedel's concept of
constructability; and Cohen's technique of forcing. Baki then
rebuilds Badiou's philosophical meditations in relation to their
conditioning by the mathematics, paying particular attention to
Cohen's forcing, which informs Badiou's analysis of the event.
Providing valuable insights into Badiou's philosophy of
mathematics, Badiou's Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set
Theory offers an excellent commentary and a new reading of Badiou's
most complex and important work.
This volume is a result of the international symposium "The
Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture," which
took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost
all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some
additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria,
the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the
history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of
analytic philosophy. They present the School's achievements as well
as its connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also
show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily.
The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well
as historians of philosophy in Central Europe.
Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity was one of the most influential
philosophical works of the twentieth century. In this collection of
essays leading specialists explore issues arising from this and
other works of Kripke's.
This book explores what it means to be 'critical' in different
disciplines in higher education and how students can be taught to
be effective critical thinkers. This book clarifies the idea of
critical thinking by investigating the 'critical' practices of
academics across a range of disciplines. Drawing on key theorists -
Wittgenstein, Geertz, Williams, Halliday - and using a
'textographic' approach, the book explores how the concept of
critical thinking is understood by academics and also how it is
constructed discursively in the texts and practices they employ in
their teaching. Critical thinking is one of the most widely
discussed concepts in debates on university learning. For many, the
idea of teaching students to be critical thinkers characterizes
more than anything else the overriding purpose of 'higher
education'. But whilst there is general agreement about its
importance as an educational ideal, there is surprisingly little
agreement about what the concept means exactly. Also at issue is
how and what students need to be taught in order to be properly
critical in their field. This searching monograph seeks answers to
these important questions.
Despite the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of John Dewey,
his work on logical theory has received relatively little
attention. Ironically, Dewey's logic was his "first and last love."
The essays in this collection pay tribute to that love by
addressing Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his
logical thought in the 1938 volume, "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry."
All the essays are original to this volume and are written by
leading Dewey scholars. Ranging from discussions of propositional
theory to logic's social and ethical implications, these essays
clarify often misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Dewey's
work, while emphasizing the seminal role of logic to Dewey's
philosophical endeavors.
This collection breaks new ground in its relevance to
contemporary philosophy of logic and epistemology and pays special
attention to applications in ethics and moral philosophy.
Since the middle of the 20th century Ludwig Wittgenstein has been
an exceptionally influential and controversial figure wherever
philosophy is studied. This is the most comprehensive volume ever
published on Wittgenstein: thirty-five leading scholars explore the
whole range of his thought, offering critical engagement and
original interpretation, and tracing his philosophical development.
Topics discussed include logic and mathematics, language and mind,
epistemology, philosophical methodology, religion, ethics, and
aesthetics. Wittgenstein's relation to other founders of analytic
philosophy such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore
is explored. This Handbook is the place to look for a full
understanding of Wittgenstein's special importance to modern
philosophy.
Writing on the justification of certain inductive inferences, the
author proposes that sometimes induction is justified and that
arguments to prove otherwise are not cogent. In the first part he
examines the problem of justifying induction, looks at some
attempts to prove that it is justified, and responds to criticisms
of these proofs. In the second part he deals with such topics as
formal logic, deductive logic, the theory of logical probability,
and probability and truth.
This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful
framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various
contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a
compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first
familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics
framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful
meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of
adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents
formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different
contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative
reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of
adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model
defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status
of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible
reasoning.
This volume provides a comprehensive collection of classic and
contemporary readings in the philosophy of logic. The selections
include some of the most important, technically exact, yet lucid
and readable expositions of central concepts and controversies in
philosophical logic. Areas of coverage include classical logic,
truth, propositions and meaning, quantifiers and quantificational
theory, validity, inference and entailment, and modality,
intensionality and propositional attitude.
Since the articles are written from a variety of perspectives,
the reader is able to critically assess the background and current
trends in philosophical applications of symbolic logic. The volume
also examines the limitations of classical and nonstandard
logics.
The book complements "Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology"
and "A Companion to Philosophical Logic, "also edited by Dale
Jacquette.
This new digital edition of The Trial and Death of Socrates:
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo presents Benjamin Jowett's
classic translations, as revised by Enhanced Media Publishing. A
number of new or expanded annotations are also included.
This is an important collection of new essays on various topics relating to realism and its rivals in metaphysics, logic, metaethics, and epistemology. The contributors include some of the leading authors in these fields and in several cases their essays constitute definitive statements of their views. Although not primarily historical this volume includes discussion of philosophers from the Middle Ages to the present day, from Aquinas to Wittgenstein. No one seriously interested in questions about realism can afford to be without this collection.
Is critical argumentation an effective way to overcome
disagreement? And does the exchange of arguments bring opponents in
a controversy closer to the truth? This study provides a new
perspective on these pivotal questions. By means of multi-agent
simulations, it investigates the truth and consensus-conduciveness
of controversial debates. The book brings together research in
formal epistemology and argumentation theory. Aside from its
consequences for discursive practice, the work may have important
implications for philosophy of science and the way we construe
scientific rationality as well.
This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques
of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author
structures his project around two focal questions. What would it
take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with
reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write
a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived
literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the
most semantically distinctive feature of the sentences of fiction
is that they areunambiguously true and false together. It is true
that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also
concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of
fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and
isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked,
would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed.
According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled
sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not
logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the
inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived
logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain
why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their
embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of
fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or
four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken
impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of
fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some
of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary
philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and
cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them.
Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem
with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is
data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect
collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and
cognition.
How science can convey a profound sense of wonder, connectedness,
and optimism about the human condition.
This book makes a compelling case that now more than ever the
public at large needs to appreciate the critical-thinking tools
that science has to offer and be educated in basic science
literacy. The author emphasizes that the methods and facts of
science are accessible to everyone, and that, contrary to popular
belief, understanding science does not require extraordinary
intelligence. He also notes that scientific rationality and
critical thinking are not only good for our physical well-being but
also are fully in sync with our highest moral codes. He illustrates
the many ways in which the scientific worldview offers a profound
sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human
condition, an inspiring perspective that satisfies age-old
spiritual aspirations.
At a time of daunting environmental challenges and rampant
misinformation, this book provides a welcome corrective and reason
to hope for the future.
One hundred years ago, Russell and Whitehead published their
epoch-making Principia Mathematica (PM), which was initially
conceived as the second volume of Russell's Principles of
Mathematics (PoM) that had appeared ten years before. No other
works can be credited to have had such an impact on the development
of logic and on philosophy in the twentieth century. However, until
now, scholars only focused on the first parts of the books - that
is, on Russell's and Whitehead's theory of logic, set-theory and
arithmetic.
Sebastien Gandon aims at reversing the perspective. His goal is to
give a picture of Russell's logicism based on a detailed reading of
the developments dealing with advanced mathematics - namely
projective geometry and the theory of quantity. This book is not
only the first study ever made of the 'later' portions of PoM and
PM, it also shows how this shift of perspective compels us to
change our view of the logicist program taken as a whole.
Truth Through Proof defends an anti-platonist philosophy of
mathematics derived from game formalism. Classic formalists claimed
implausibly that mathematical utterances are truth-valueless moves
in a game. Alan Weir aims to develop a more satisfactory successor
to game formalism utilising a widely accepted, broadly neo-Fregean
framework, in which the proposition expressed by an utterance is a
function of both sense and background circumstance. This framework
allows for sentences whose truth-conditions are not
representational, which are made true or false by conditions
residing in the circumstances of utterances but not transparently
in the sense.
Applications to projectivism and fiction pave the way for the claim
that mathematical utterances are made true or false by the
existence of concrete proofs or refutations, though these
truth-making conditions form no part of their sense or
informational content.
The position is compared with rivals, an account of the
applicability of mathematics developed, and a new account of the
nature of idealisation proffered in which it is argued that the
finitistic limitations Godel placed on proofs are without rational
justification. Finally a non-classical logical system is provided
in which excluded middle fails, yet enough logical power remains to
recapture the results of standard mathematics.
This book presents the current state of the art regarding the
application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice
of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the
analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning
concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the
process of law making have variously emphasised its political,
social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical
analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools
in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least
to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems-and
some possible solutions-as seen through the work of leading
contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written
by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on
the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to
the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices
concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book
presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the
emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the
area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal
systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented
by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the
structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of
deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic
concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How
are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of
legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of
contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging
from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in
this definitive collection.
In a fragment entitled Elementa Nova Matheseos Universalis (1683?)
Leibniz writes "the mathesis [...] shall deliver the method through
which things that are conceivable can be exactly determined"; in
another fragment he takes the mathesis to be "the science of all
things that are conceivable." Leibniz considers all mathematical
disciplines as branches of the mathesis and conceives the mathesis
as a general science of forms applicable not only to magnitudes but
to every object that exists in our imagination, i.e. that is
possible at least in principle. As a general science of forms the
mathesis investigates possible relations between "arbitrary
objects" ("objets quelconques"). It is an abstract theory of
combinations and relations among objects whatsoever. In 1810 the
mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano published a booklet
entitled Contributions to a Better-Grounded Presentation of
Mathematics. There is, according to him, a certain objective
connection among the truths that are germane to a certain
homogeneous field of objects: some truths are the "reasons"
("Grunde") of others, and the latter are "consequences" ("Folgen")
of the former. The reason-consequence relation seems to be the
counterpart of causality at the level of a relation between true
propositions. Arigorous proof is characterized in this context as a
proof that shows the reason of the proposition that is to be
proven. Requirements imposed on rigorous proofs seem to anticipate
normalization results in current proof theory. The contributors of
Mathesis Universalis, Computability and Proof, leading experts in
the fields of computer science, mathematics, logic and philosophy,
show the evolution of these and related ideas exploring topics in
proof theory, computability theory, intuitionistic logic,
constructivism and reverse mathematics, delving deeply into a
contextual examination of the relationship between mathematical
rigor and demands for simplification.
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