'David Pole, in his The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, makes an admirable attempt to clarify the central points of Wittgenstein's philosophy in a straightforward manner. He approaches it from the outside with sympathy and good sense. And since he combines a clear head with a fluent style of writing - a combination that is rare among the initiated - his book will prove an excellent introduction for those who need a succinct account of Wittgenstein's later philosophy without any mystical overtones.' - The Economist 'There is now a real need for a commentary on what must in frankness be admitted to be an exceedingly difficult corpus of philosophy. Mr Pole's little book is a response to that need; if small in bulk, it is rich in ideas... and all students of Wittgenstein will turn to it with gratitude.' - Sunday Times

This volume comprises nine lively and insightful essays by leading scholars on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing mainly on his early work. The essays are written from a range of perspectives and do not belong to any one exegetical school; they approach Wittgenstein's work directly, seeking to understand it in its own terms and by reference to the context in which it was produced. The contributors cover a wide range of aspects of Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but three central themes emerge: the relationship between Wittgenstein's account of representation and Russell's theories of judgment; the role of objects in the tractarian system; and Wittgenstein's philosophical method. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how progress in the understanding of Wittgenstein's work is not to be made by focusing on overarching, ideological issues, but by paying close attention to his engagement with specific philosophical problems.

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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

This is a mathematically-oriented advanced text in modal logic, a discipline conceived in philosophy and having found applications in mathematics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and computer science. It presents in a systematic and comprehensive way a wide range of classical and novel methods and results and can be used by a specialist as a reference book.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.