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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
This volume consists of papers delivered at the conference 'The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy', organised in celebration of the hun- dredth anniversary ofKazimierz Twardowski's first lecture as Professor of Phi- losophy at Lvov University. This lecture can be regarded as the starting point of the development of analytic philosophy in Poland, which culminated in the Warsaw School of Logic. The conference was held in Lvov (15-17 November) and Warsaw (19-21 November 1995). It was organised jointly by the Ukrainian Academy of Sci- ences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The general organisation was un- dertaken by Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk (polish Academy of Sciences) and Professor Marat Vernikov (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). Professors Jaroslaw Isaievich (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) and Jan Wolenski (Jagiel- Ionian University) were responsible for the scientific programme. Over 100 philosophers participated in the conference. Papers published in this volume are organised according to the sections of the conference and rep- of the papers delivered. resent a selection The editors would like to express their gratitude to Professor Andrzej Grze- gorczyk, spiritus movens of the conference, who, by including the present vol- ume in a programme of publications connected with the hundredth anniversary of the Lvov-Warsaw School, provided financial support for its preparation. Fi- nally, we express our gratitude to Dr Timothy Childers of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for correcting the English of the papers.
A Theory of Argument is an advanced textbook intended for students in philosophy, communications studies and linguistics who have completed at least one course in argumentation theory, information logic, critical thinking or formal logic. Containing nearly 400 exercises, Mark Vorobej develops a novel approach to argument interpretation and evaluation. One of the key themes of the book is that we cannot succeed in distinguishing good argument from bad arguments until we learn to listen carefully to others. Part I develops a relativistic account of argument cogency that allows for rational disagreement. Part II offers a comprehensive and rigorous account of argument diagramming. Hybrid arguments are contrasted with linked and convergent arguments, and a novel technique is introduced for graphically recording disagreements with authorial claims.
This book argues that there is a common cognitive mechanism underlying all indexical thoughts, in spite of their seeming diversity. Indexical thoughts are mental representations, such as beliefs and desires. They represent items from a thinker's point of view or her cognitive perspective. We typically express them by means of sentences containing linguistic expressions such as 'this (F)' or 'that (F)', adverbs like 'here', 'now', and 'today', and the personal pronoun 'I'. While generally agreeing that representing the world from a thinker's cognitive perspective is a key feature of indexical thoughts, philosophers disagree as to whether a thinker's cognitive perspective can be captured and rationalized by semantic content and, if so, what kind of content this is. This book surveys competing views and then advances its own positive account. Ultimately, it argues that a thinker's cognitive perspective - or her indexical point of view - is to be explained in terms of the content that is believed and asserted as the only kind of content that there is which thereby serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. The Indexical Point of View will be of interest to philosophers of mind and language, linguists, and cognitive scientists.
This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume's forty-one original chapters, written by many of today's leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
The present monograph is a slightly revised version of my Habilitations schrift Proof-theoretic Aspects of Intensional and Non-Classical Logics, successfully defended at Leipzig University, November 1997. It collects work on proof systems for modal and constructive logics I have done over the last few years. The main concern is display logic, a certain refinement of Gentzen's sequent calculus developed by Nuel D. Belnap. This book is far from offering a comprehensive presentation of generalized sequent systems for modal logics broadly conceived. The proof-theory of non-classical logics is a rapidly developing field, and even the generalizations of the ordinary notion of sequent listed in Chapter 1 can hardly be presented in great detail within a single volume. In addition to further investigating the various approaches toward generalized Gentzen systems, it is important to compare them and to discuss their relative advantages and disadvantages. An initial attempt at bringing together work on different kinds of proof systems for modal logics has been made in [188]. Another step in the same direction is [196]. Since Chapter 1 contains introductory considerations and, moreover, every remaining chapter begins with some surveying or summarizing remarks, in this preface I shall only emphasize a relation to philosophy that is important to me, register the sources of papers that have entered this book in some form or another, and acknowledge advice and support.
This second and extended edition of Priest's classic includes new
chapters on Heidegger and Nagarjuna, as well as reflections on
reactions to the first edition.
Berkeley: Ideas, Immaterialism, and Objective Presence offers a novel interpretation of the arc of George Berkeley's philosophical thought, from his theory of vision through his immaterialism and finally to his proof of God's existence. Keota Fields unifies these themes to focus on Berkeley's use of the Cartesian doctrine of objective presence, which demands causal explanations of the content of ideas. This is particularly so with respect to Berkeley's arguments for immaterialism. One of those arguments is typically read as a straightforward transitivity argument. After identifying material bodies with sensible objects, and the latter with ideas of sense, Berkeley concludes that putative material bodies are actually identical to collections of ideas of sense. George Pappas has recently defended an alternative reading that grounds Berkeley's immaterialism in his rejection of what Pappas calls category-transcendent abstract ideas: abstract ideas of beings, entia, or existence. Fields uses Pappas's interpretation as a framework for understanding Berkeley's immaterialism in terms of transcendental arguments. Early moderns routinely used the doctrine of objective presence to justify transcendental arguments for the existence of material substance. The claim was that physical qualities are necessary for any causal explanation of the content of sensory ideas; since those qualities are represented to perceivers as ontologically dependent, material substance is the necessary condition for the existence of physical qualities and a fortiori any causal explanation of the content of sensory ideas. On the reading defended here, Berkeley rejects Locke's transcendental argument for the existence of material substratum on the grounds that it turns decisively on the aforementioned category-transcendent abstract ideas, which Berkeley rejects as logically inconsistent. In its place, Berkeley offers his own transcendental argument designed to show that only minds and ideas exist. He uses that argument as a
This book brings together a selection of essays by one of the pre-eminent scholars of informal logic. Following an approach that is empirical but not psychological; dialectical but not dialogical, and focused on interpretation without neglecting evaluation, Maurice Finocchiaro defines concepts such as reasoning, argument, argument analysis, critical reasoning, methodological reflection, judgment, critical thinking, and informal logic. He defends ideas about the rarity of fallacies but frequently of fallacious reasoning; the asymmetry of positive and negative in argumentation, interpretation and evaluation and the role of critical thinking in science, among other topics. Containing extended critiques of the views of many contemporary scholars, he also integrates into the discussion Arnauld's Post-Royal Logic, Gramsci's theory of intellectuals, and case studies from the history of science, particularly the work of Galileo, Newton, Huygens, and Lavoisier.
The theory of the square of opposition has been studied for over 2,000 years and has seen a resurgence in new theories and research since the second half of the twentieth century. This volume collects papers presented at the Sixth World Congress on the Square of Opposition, held in Crete in 2018, developing an interdisciplinary exploration of the theory. Chapter authors explore subjects such as Aristotle's ontological square, logical oppositions in Avicenna's hypothetical logic, and the power of the square of opposition to solve theological problems regarding predestination and theodicy. Other topics covered include: Hegel's opposition to diagrams De Morgan's unpublished octagon of opposition turnstile figures of opposition institutional model-theoretic treatment of oppositions Lacan's four formulas of sexuation the theory of oppositional poly-simplexes The Exoteric Square of Opposition will appeal to pure logicians, historians of logic, semioticians, philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, and psychoanalysts.
This is a title on the foundations of defeasible logic, which explores the formal properties of everyday reasoning patterns whereby people jump to conclusions, reserving the right to retract them in the light of further information. Although technical in nature the book contains sections that outline basic issues by means of intuitive and simple examples. This book is primarily targeted at philosophers interested in the foundations of defeasible logic, logicians, and specialists in artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science.
This book defends the Direct Reference (DR) thesis in philosophy of language regarding proper names and indexical pronouns. It uniquely draws out the significant consequences of DR when it is conjoined with the fact that these singular terms sometimes fail to refer. Even though DR is widely endorsed by philosophers of language, many philosophically important and radically controversial consequences of the thesis have gone largely unexplored. This book makes an important contribution to the DR literature by explicitly addressing the consequences that follow from DR regarding failure of reference. Michael McKinsey argues that only a form of neutral free logic can capture a revised concept of logical truth that is consistent with the fact that any sentence of any form that contains a directly referring genuine term can fail to be either true or false on interpretations where that term fails to refer. He also explains how it is possible for there to be true (or false) sentences that contain non-referring names, even though this possibility seems inconsistent with DR. Consequences of Reference Failure will be of interest to philosophers of language and logic and linguists working on Direct Reference.
This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues-issues about possibility and necessity-are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the view that the analysis of meaning is not just a preliminary to answering modal questions in philosophy; it is not merely that before we can find out whether something is possible, we need to get clear on what we are talking about. Rather, clarity about meaning often brings with it answers to modal questions. In service of this view, the author analyzes the notion of necessity and develops ideas about linguistic meaning, applying them to several puzzles and problems in philosophy of language. Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic.
This book presents a systematic unifying-pluralist account-a "constructive-engagement" account-of how cross-tradition engagement in philosophy is possible. The goal of this "constructive-engagement" account is, by way of reflective criticism, argumentation, and methodological guiding principles, to inquire into how distinct approaches from different philosophical traditions can talk to and learn from each other for the sake of making joint contributions to the contemporary development of philosophy. In Part I of the book, Bo Mou explores a range of fundamental theoretic and methodological issues in cross-tradition philosophical engagement and philosophical interpretation. In Part II, he analyzes several representative case studies that demonstrate how relevant resources in the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions can constructively engage with each other. These studies cover issues in philosophical methodology, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. The book's theoretical and practical approaches expand the vision, coverage, and agenda of doing philosophy comparatively, and promote worldwide joint efforts of cross-tradition philosophical inquiries. Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy will be of interest to graduate students and scholars interested in comparative philosophy and the intersection of Chinese and Western philosophy. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the ways in which cross-tradition philosophical engagement can enhance contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics.
This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic (La Logique ou l'Art de penser, 1662-1685) of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory.
1. Metaphors and Logic Metaphors are among the most vigorous offspring of the creative mind; but their vitality springs from the fact that they are logical organisms in the ecology of l- guage. I aim to use logical techniques to analyze the meanings of metaphors. My goal here is to show how contemporary formal semantics can be extended to handle metaphorical utterances. What distinguishes this work is that it focuses intensely on the logical aspects of metaphors. I stress the role of logic in the generation and int- pretation of metaphors. While I don't presuppose any formal training in logic, some familiarity with philosophical logic (the propositional calculus and the predicate c- culus) is helpful. Since my theory makes great use of the notion of structure, I refer to it as the structural theory of m etaphor (STM). STM is a semant ic theory of m etaphor : if STM is correct, then metaphors are cognitively meaningful and are n- trivially logically linked with truth. I aim to extend possible worlds semantics to handle metaphors. I'll argue that some sentences in natural languages like English have multiple meanings: "Juliet is the sun" has (at least) two meanings: the literal meaning "(Juliet is the sunkIT" and the metaphorical meaning "(Juliet is the sun)MET". Each meaning is a function from (possible) worlds to truth-values. I deny that these functions are identical; I deny that the metaphorical function is necessarily false or necessarily true.
This book proposes a novel theory of truth and falsity. It argues that truth is a form of reference and falsity is a form of reference failure. Most of the philosophical literature on truth concentrates on certain ontological and epistemic problems. This book focuses instead on language. By utilizing the Fregean idea that sentences are singular referring expressions, the author develops novel connections between the philosophical study of truth and falsity and the huge literature in in the philosophy of language on the notion of reference. The first part of the book constructs the author's theory and argues for it in length. Part II addresses the ways in which the theory relates to, and is different from, some of the basic theories of truth. Part III takes up how to account for the truth of sentences with logical operators and quantifiers. Finally, Part IV discusses the applications and implications of the theory for longstanding problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics.
Absurdity, time, death-each poses a profound threat to Being, compelling us to face our limits and our finitude. Yet what does it mean to fully realize and experience these threats? Finite Transcendence: Existential Exile and the Myth of Home presents a thoughtful and thorough examination of these challenges and questions, arguing the universality of the realization of finitude in the experience of exile. By tracing the historical presence and experience of notions of "faith" and "exile" in Western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present, Steven A. Burr demonstrates the character of each as fundamental constitutive components of what it means to be human. The book discusses essential elements of each, culminating in a compelling account of "existential exile" as a definitive name for the human experience of finitude. Burr follows with a comprehensive analysis of the writings of Albert Camus, demonstrating an edifying articulation of, engagement with, and reconciliation of the condition of existential exile. Finally, based on the model suggested in Camus's approach, Burr discusses responses to exile and articulates the meaning of home as the transcendence of exile. Finite Transcendence is a work that will be of great value to anyone working in or studying existentialism, philosophy of religion, hermeneutics, and social theory, as well as to anyone interested in questions of faith and society, religion, or secularity.
This book is dedicated to the work of Alasdair Urquhart. The book starts out with an introduction to and an overview of Urquhart's work, and an autobiographical essay by Urquhart. This introductory section is followed by papers on algebraic logic and lattice theory, papers on the complexity of proofs, and papers on philosophical logic and history of logic. The final section of the book contains a response to the papers by Urquhart. Alasdair Urquhart has made extremely important contributions to a variety of fields in logic. He produced some of the earliest work on the semantics of relevant logic. He provided the undecidability of the logics R (of relevant implication) and E (of relevant entailment), as well as some of their close neighbors. He proved that interpolation fails in some of those systems. Urquhart has done very important work in complexity theory, both about the complexity of proofs in classical and some nonclassical logics. In pure algebra, he has produced a representation theorem for lattices and some rather beautiful duality theorems. In addition, he has done important work in the history of logic, especially on Bertrand Russell, including editing Volume four of Russell's Collected Papers.
The formal systems of logic have ordinarily been regarded as independent of biology, but recent developments in evolutionary theory suggest that biology and logic may be intimately interrelated. In this book, William S. Cooper outlines a theory of rationality in which logical law emerges as an intrinsic aspect of evolutionary biology. He examines the connections between logic and evolutionary biology and illustrates how logical rules are derived directly from evolutionary principles, and therefore, have no independent status of their own. This biological perspective on logic, though at present unorthodox, could change traditional ideas about the reasoning process.
This monograph proposes a new way of implementing interaction in logic. It also provides an elementary introduction to Constructive Type Theory (CTT). The authors equally emphasize basic ideas and finer technical details. In addition, many worked out exercises and examples will help readers to better understand the concepts under discussion. One of the chief ideas animating this study is that the dialogical understanding of definitional equality and its execution provide both a simple and a direct way of implementing the CTT approach within a game-theoretical conception of meaning. In addition, the importance of the play level over the strategy level is stressed, binding together the matter of execution with that of equality and the finitary perspective on games constituting meaning. According to this perspective the emergence of concepts are not only games of giving and asking for reasons (games involving Why-questions), they are also games that include moves establishing how it is that the reasons brought forward accomplish their explicative task. Thus, immanent reasoning games are dialogical games of Why and How.
Between the two world wars, Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939), created the famous and important system of foundations of mathematics that comprises three deductive theories: Protothetic, Ontology, and Mereology. His research started in 1914 with studies on the general theory of sets (later named `Mereology'). Ontology followed between 1919 and 1921, and was the next step towards an integrated system. In order to combine these two systematically he constructed Protothetic - the system of `first principles'. Together they amount to what Z. Jordan called `... most thorough, original, and philosophically significant attempt to provide a logically secure foundation for the whole of mathematics'. The volume collects many of the most significant commentaries on, and contributions to, Protothetic. A Protothetic Bibliography is included.
This reissue of the modern classic on the study of argumentation features a new Introduction by the author.
This volume collects fifteen original essays on E. J. Lowe's work on metaphysics and ontology. The essays connect Lowe's insights with contemporary issues in metaphysics. E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) was one of the most influential analytical philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle's thought, E. J. Lowe treated metaphysics as an autonomous discipline concerned with the fundamental structure of reality. The chapters in this volume reflect on his path-breaking work. They deal with a wide range of metaphysical issues including four-category ontology, the causal and non-causal aspects of agency, categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality, the existence of relations, property dualism, powers and abilities, personal identity, predication, and topological ontology. Taken together, the chapters reflect the liveliness of contemporary debates in metaphysics and the enduring impact of Lowe's thought on them. E. J. Lowe and Ontology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
ADVANGEBOOKS - UNDERSTANDING ARGUMENTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO INFORMAL LOGIC, 9E shows readers how to construct arguments in everyday life, using everyday language. In addition, this easy-to-read textbook also devotes three chapters to the formal aspects of logic including forms of argument, as well as propositional, categorical, and quantificational logic. Plus, this edition helps readers apply informal logic to legal, moral, scientific, religious, and philosophical scenarios, too. |
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