This book presents the New Theory of Argumentation, popularly known as the New Rhetoric, as an innovative theoretical and methodological system which will become increasingly important. Two factors determine the importance of this philosophy: (1) The collapse of all modern ideologies, many sociopolitical systems and their associated philosophies, whether of the right or the left, means that the era of the quick, dogmatic perception of how to force people to feel free and happy is over. (2) New forms and institutions of social and economic life must be found among the wreckage. The solutions sought must work best for the greatest number of people and must be flexible enough to allow the reinterpretation of all our determinations, from the very beginning. The New Rhetoric rejects all absolutist and dogmatic ideas. But neither does it support absolute relativism. It constitutes a method for the endless search for truthful explanations and for enlightened practical activity. Truth is only the process of approaching it. While critical of formal logic, the New Rhetoric develops the concepts of other', experimental', flexible', and logic of good sense'. The introduction and elaboration of the concept of reasonableness' is presented as a milestone in the evolution of scientific methodology. The New Rhetoric has overcome the traditional contradictions between logic, rationalism and dialectic and has laid new foundations for a modern theory of morality, law, legal interpretation, and human rights. This book discusses such problems as: new moral notions, the new dilemma of Cain, the spurious notions of 'centrism', Antigone's new arguments, 'argumentation is not bargaining', new foundations oftolerance and justice. It ends with a section on 'Resolutions for the New Century', written in the spirit of traditional enlightenment, rule of reason and humanism, but which goes beyond them.

The popular literature on mathematical logic is rather extensive and written for the most varied categories of readers. College students or adults who read it in their free time may find here a vast number of thought-provoking logical problems. The reader who wishes to enrich his mathematical background in the hope that this will help him in his everyday life can discover detailed descriptions of practical (and quite often -- not so practical ) applications of logic. The large number of popular books on logic has given rise to the hope that by applying mathematical logic, students will finally learn how to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions and other points of logic in the college course in mathematics. But the habit of teachers of mathematical analysis, for example, to stick to problems dealing with sequences without limit, uniformly continuous functions, etc. has, unfortunately, led to the writing of textbooks that present prescriptions for the mechanical construction of definitions of negative concepts which seem to obviate the need for any thinking on the reader's part. We are most certainly not able to enumerate everything the reader may draw out of existing books on mathematical logic, however.

In this book, the contributors present an overview of recent developments in philosophy of science by providing a collection of articles that together constitute a systematic and comprehensive investigation of how to understand the relation between the social sciences and democracy.

This book, translated from the French, is an introduction to first-order model theory. The first six chapters are very basic: starting from scratch, they quickly reach the essential, namely, the back-and-forth method and compactness, which are illustrated with examples taken from algebra. The next chapter introduces logic via the study of the models of arithmetic, and the following is a combinatorial tool-box preparing for the chapters on saturated and prime models. The last ten chapters form a rather complete but nevertheless accessible exposition of stability theory, which is the core of the subject.

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

This book aids in the rehabilitation of the wrongfully deprecated work of William Parry, and is the only full-length investigation into Parry-type propositional logics. A central tenet of the monograph is that the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the mereological analogy emerges - its effervescence with respect to fields ranging from metaphysics to computer programming - provides compelling evidence that the study of logics of analytic implication can be instrumental in identifying connections between topics that would otherwise remain hidden. More concretely, the book identifies and discusses a host of cases in which analytic implication can play an important role in revealing distinct problems to be facets of a larger, cross-disciplinary problem. It introduces an element of constancy and cohesion that has previously been absent in a regrettably fractured field, shoring up those who are sympathetic to the worth of mereological analogy. Moreover, it generates new interest in the field by illustrating a wide range of interesting features present in such logics - and highlighting these features to appeal to researchers in many fields.

I was very happy when in 1997 Fiachra Long came to spend part of his sabbatical leave at the Archives Maurice Blondel at Louvain-Ia-Neuve. This allowed him to bring together and complete his translation of three important articles from Maurice Blondel, known as the philosopher of Aix-en-Province. These three articles fonn a unity: they make explicit certain aspects of the method used in the great thesis of 1893, Action. This thesis, it is well known, aroused many polemic debates after its appearance. Thomist theologians accused Blondel of turning back towards Kantian idealism whereas the philosophers of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale accused him on the contrary of falling back on a pre-critical realism. The three articles translated here, each in its own way, attempt to pass beyond these two opposite charges. The Idealist Illusion (1898) underlines the fact that the content of consciousness should be unfurled as it appears, by withdrawing from any idealist or realist prejudice, before judging the consistency of its content as a whole. In this way Blondel supports the "phenomenological" method used in his thesis. The Elementary Principle of a Logic of the Moral Life (1903) is a very well-worked text which shows that "the logic of possession and privation" is broader than "the logic of amnnation and negation. " Using these words, Blondel develops certain striking laws of action such as that of the "parallelogram of contrary forces.

The notion of truth has become much discussed in philosophy over the last few decade, with many senior figures grappling with the relativist and constructivist notions of truth popular in other parts of the academy. It continues to be a subject enjoying vibrant debate. Despite the varieties of views on truth, most of the discussion has agreed that truth has a uniform, stable nature, ranging across the boundaries of human knowledge. The editors and contributors to this volume challenge this very basic assumption, putting forth the idea of what is called alethic pluralism - that there is more than one way of being true. While it is uncontroversial that there are different kinds of truth (moral truth, scientific truth etc), these pluralist views propose that truth itself can vary and that bearers of truth can literally be true in different ways. This volume presents new essays by some of the world's leading philosophers to explore this new view and its implications for the philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and logic.

Distinctions of Reason and Reasonable Distinctions is an intellectual biography of John Wallis (1616-1703), professor of mathematics at Oxford for over half a century. His career spans the political tumult of the English Civil Wars, the religious upheaval of the Church of England, and the fascinating developments in mathematics and natural philosophy. His ability to navigate this terrain and advance human learning in the academic world was facilitated by his use of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez's theory of distinctions. This Roman Catholic's philosophy in the hands of a Protestant divine fostered an instrumentalism necessary to bridge the old and new. With this tool, Wallis brought modern science into the university and helped form the Royal Society.

Intuitionistic type theory can be described, somewhat boldly, as a partial fulfillment of the dream of a universal language for science. This book expounds several aspects of intuitionistic type theory, such as the notion of set, reference vs. computation, assumption, and substitution. Moreover, the book includes philosophically relevant sections on the principle of compositionality, lingua characteristica, epistemology, propositional logic, intuitionism, and the law of excluded middle. Ample historical references are given throughout the book.

It must be acknowledged that the essays presented here do not constitute a systematic account of any sort but represent occasional forays. Some deal with matters that happened to evoke Rescher's interest, others grew out of a chance encounter with a text he deemed to be of particular value. Throughout, challenges of the work itself more than compensated the author's efforts. Logic has always been of crucially important concern to philosophers. Rescher's own involvement with the history of logic goes back to his work on Leibniz in the 1950's (represented by Chapter 8 of the present book). Thereafter, during the 1960's he devoted considerable effort to the contributions of the medieval logicians of the Arabic-using world (here represented in Chapters 2-6). Moreover, Rescher have from time to time returned to the area to look at some aspects of the more recent scene, as Chapters 8-9 illustrate. In some instances the present essays have been overtaken by subsequent events-events which in fact helped to promote. This is true in particular in chapter 6's work on Arabic work regarding temporal modalities, which was instrumental in evoking the important contributions of Tony Street of Cambridge University.

Alfred Tarski was one of the two giants of the twentieth-century development of logic, along with Kurt Goedel. The four volumes of this collection contain all of Tarski's published papers and abstracts, as well as a comprehensive bibliography. Here will be found many of the works, spanning the period 1921 through 1979, which are the bedrock of contemporary areas of logic, whether in mathematics or philosophy. These areas include the theory of truth in formalized languages, decision methods and undecidable theories, foundations of geometry, set theory, and model theory, algebraic logic, and universal algebra.

This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hegel's important works, Bencivenga avoids getting bogged down in short-lived scholarly debates to provide a work of permanent significance and usefulness.

George Boole (1815-1864) is well known to mathematicians for his research and textbooks on the calculus, but his name has spread world-wide for his innovations in symbolic logic and the development and applications made since his day. The utility of "Boolean algebra" in computing has greatly increased curiosity in the nature and extent of his achievements. His work is most accessible in his two books on logic, "A mathematical analysis of logic" (1947) and "An investigation of the laws of thought" (1954). But at various times he wrote manuscript essays, especially after the publication of the second book; several were intended for a non-technical work, "The Philosophy of logic," which he was not able to complete. This volume contains an edited selection which not only relates them to Boole's publications and the historical context of his time, but also describes their strange history of family, followers and scholars have treid to confect an edition. The book will appeal to logicians, mathematicians and philosophers, and those interested in the histories of the corresponding subjects; and also students of the early Victorian Britain in which they were written.

The aim of this thematically unified anthology is to track the history of epistemic logic, to consider some important applications of these logics of knowledge and belief in a variety of fields, and finally to discuss future directions of research with particular emphasis on 'active agenthood' and multi-modal systems. It is accessible to researchers and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, game theory, economics and related disciplines utilizing the means and methods of epistemic logic.

What do philosophy and computer science have in common? It turns out, quite a lot! In providing an introduction to computer science (using Python), Daniel Lim presents in this book key philosophical issues, ranging from external world skepticism to the existence of God to the problem of induction. These issues, and others, are introduced through the use of critical computational concepts, ranging from image manipulation to recursive programming to elementary machine learning techniques. In illuminating some of the overlapping conceptual spaces of computer science and philosophy, Lim teaches the reader fundamental programming skills and also allows her to develop the critical thinking skills essential for examining some of the enduring questions of philosophy. Key Features Teaches readers actual computer programming, not merely ideas about computers Includes fun programming projects (like digital image manipulation and Game of Life simulation), allowing the reader to develop the ability to write larger computer programs that require decomposition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking Uses computational concepts to introduce, clarify, and develop a variety of philosophical issues Covers various aspects of machine learning and relates them to philosophical issues involving science and induction as well as to ethical issues Provides a framework to critically analyze arguments in classic and contemporary philosophical debates

The Dialectical Forge identifies dialectical disputation (jadal) as a primary formative dynamic in the evolution of pre-modern Islamic legal systems, promoting dialectic from relative obscurity to a more appropriate position at the forefront of Islamic legal studies. The author introduces and develops a dialectics-based analytical method for the study of pre-modern Islamic legal argumentation, examines parallels and divergences between Aristotelian dialectic and early juridical jadal-theory, and proposes a multi-component paradigm-the Dialectical Forge Model-to account for the power of jadal in shaping Islamic law and legal theory.In addition to overviews of current evolutionary narratives for Islamic legal theory and dialectic, and expositions on key texts, this work shines an analytical light upon the considerably sophisticated "proto-system" of juridical dialectical teaching and practice evident in Islam's second century, several generations before the first "full-system" treatises of legal and dialectical theory were composed. This proto-system is revealed from analyses of dialectical sequences in the 2nd/8th century Kitab Ikhtilaf al-'Iraqiyyin / 'Iraqiyyayn (the "subject-text") through a lens molded from 5th/11th century jadal-theory treatises (the "lens-texts"). Specific features thus uncovered inform the elaboration of a Dialectical Forge Model, whose more general components and functions are explored in closing chapters.

This book deals with a basic problem arising within the Bayesian approach 1 to scientific methodology, namely the choice of prior probabilities. The problem will be considered with special reference to some inference methods used within Bayesian statistics (BS) and the so-called theory of inductive 2 probabilities (T/P). In this study an important role will be played by the assumption - defended by Sir Karl Popper and the supporters of the current verisimilitude theory (VT) - that the cognitive goal of science is the achievement of a high degree of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. A more detailed outline of the issues and objectives of the book is given in Section 1. In Section 2 the historical background of the Bayesian approach and the verisimilitude theory is briefly illustrated. In Section 3, the methods used in TIP and BS for making multinomial inference~ are considered and some conceptual relationships between TIP and BS are pointed out. In Section 4 the main lines of a new approach to the problem of the choice of prior probabilities are illustrated. Lastly, in Section 5 >the structure of the book is described and a first explanation of some technical terms is provided.

This book is intended to be a survey of the most important results in mathematical logic for philosophers. It is a survey of results which have philosophical significance and it is intended to be accessible to philosophers. I have assumed the mathematical sophistication acquired. in an introductory logic course or in reading a basic logic text. In addition to proving the most philosophically significant results in mathematical logic, I have attempted to illustrate various methods of proof. For example, the completeness of quantification theory is proved both constructively and non-constructively and relative ad vantages of each type of proof are discussed. Similarly, constructive and non-constructive versions of Godel's first incompleteness theorem are given. I hope that the reader. will develop facility with the methods of proof and also be caused by reflect on their differences. I assume familiarity with quantification theory both in under standing the notations and in finding object language proofs. Strictly speaking the presentation is self-contained, but it would be very difficult for someone without background in the subject to follow the material from the beginning. This is necessary if the notes are to be accessible to readers who have had diverse backgrounds at a more elementary level. However, to make them accessible to readers with no background would require writing yet another introductory logic text. Numerous exercises have been included and many of these are integral parts of the proofs."

Tadeusz Kotarbinski is one of towering figures in contemporary Polish philosophy. He was a great thinker, a great teacher, a great organizer of philosophical and scientific life (he was, among others, the rector of the Uni versi ty of t6dz, the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the president of the International Institute of Philosophy), and, last but not least, a great moral authority. He died at the age of 96 on October 3, 1981. Kotarbinski was active in almost all branches of philosophy. He made many significant contributions to logic, semantics, ontology, epistemology, history of philosophy, and ethics. He created a new field, namely praxiology. Thus, using an ancient distinction, he contributed to theoretical as well as practical philoso hy. Kotarbinski regarded praxiology as his major philosophical "child." Doubtless, praxiology belongs to practical philosophy. This collection, howewer, is mainly devoted to Kotarbinski' s theoretical philosophy. Reism - Kotarbinski' s fundamental idea of ontology and semantics - is the central topic of most papers included here; even Pszczolowski' s essay on praxiology considers its ontological basis., Only two papers, namely that of Zarnecka-Bialy and that of Wolenski, are not linked with reism. However, both fall under the general label "Kotarbinski: logic, semantics and ontology." The collection partly consists of earlier published papers.