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Books > Science & Mathematics > Mathematics > Philosophy of mathematics
The highly praised Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, has been used in many game-theory courses over the years and has also found its way into leading journals of this field. Using the rich material offered by this movie, alongside other elements from popular culture, literature and history, this book furthers this exploration into a fascinating area of economics. In his series of Schumpeter lectures, Manfred J. Holler uses his analysis of Sergio Leone's movie as a starting point to argue that combinations of desires, secrets and second-mover advantages trigger conflicts but also allow for conflict resolution. Many people and organizations have a desire for secrecy, and this is often motivated by a desire to create a second-mover advantage, and by undercutting the second-mover advantage of others. This book demonstrates that the interaction of these three ingredients account for a large share of social problems and failures in politics and business but, somewhat paradoxically, can also help to overcome some of the problems that result by applying one or two of them in isolation. This book has been written for curious readers who want to see the world from a different perspective and who like simple mathematics alongside story telling. Its accessible approach means that it will be of use to students and academics alike, especially all those interested in decision making, game theory, and market entry.
First published in 2005. This study seeks to identify the specific mistakes that critics were alluding to in their passing asides on Wittgenstein's failure to grasp the mechanics of Godel's second incompleteness theorem. It also includes an understanding of his attack on meta-mathematics and Hilbert's Programme.
Probability theory is a key tool of the physical, mathematical, and social sciences. It has also been playing an increasingly significant role in philosophy: in epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of religion, and elsewhere. A case can be made that probability is as vital a part of the philosopher's toolkit as logic. Moreover, there is a fruitful two-way street between probability theory and philosophy: the theory informs much of the work of philosophers, and philosophical inquiry, in turn, has shed considerable light on the theory. This Handbook encapsulates and furthers the influence of philosophy on probability, and of probability on philosophy. Nearly forty articles summarise the state of play and present new insights in various areas of research at the intersection of these two fields. The articles will be of special interest to practitioners of probability who seek a greater understanding of its mathematical and conceptual foundations, and to philosophers who want to get up to speed on the cutting edge of research in this area. There is plenty here to entice philosophical readers who don't work especially on probability but who want to learn more about it and its applications. Indeed, this volume should appeal to the intellectually curious generally; after all, there is much here to be curious about. We do not expect all of this volume's audience to have a thorough training in probability theory. And while probability is relevant to the work of many philosophers, they often do not have much of a background in its formalism. With this in mind, we begin with 'Probability for Everyone-Even Philosophers', a primer on those parts of probability theory that we believe are most important for philosophers to know. The rest of the volume is divided into seven main sections: History; Formalism; Alternatives to Standard Probability Theory; Interpretations and Interpretive Issues; Probabilistic Judgment and Its Applications; Applications of Probability: Science; and Applications of Probability: Philosophy.
Originally published in 1988. This text gives a lucid account of the most distinctive and influential responses by twentieth century philosophers to the problem of the unity of the proposition. The problem first became central to twentieth-century philosophy as a result of the depsychoiogising of logic brought about by Bradley and Frege who, responding to the 'Psychologism' of Mill and Hume, drew a sharp distinction between the province of psychology and the province of logic. This author argues that while Russell, Ryle and Davidson, each in different ways, attempted a theoretical solution, Frege and Wittgenstein (both in the Tractatus and the Investigations) rightly maintained that no theoretical solution is possible. It is this which explains the importance Wittgenstein attached in his later work to the idea of agreement in judgments. The two final chapters illustrate the way in which a response to the problem affects the way in which we think about the nature of the mind. They contain a discussion of Strawson's concept of a person and provide a striking critique of the philosophical claims made by devotees of artificial intelligence, in particular those made by Daniel Dennett.
Originally published in 1941. Professor Ushenko treats of current problems in technical Logic, involving Symbolic Logic to a marked extent. He deprecates the tendency, in influential quarters, to regard Logic as a branch of Mathematics and advances the intuitionalist theory of Logic. This involves criticism of Carnap, Russell,Wittgenstein, Broad and Whitehead, with additional discussions on Kant and Hegel. The author believes that the union of Philosophy and Logic is a natural one, and that an exclusively mathematical treatment cannot give an adequate account of Logic. A fundamental characteristic of Logic is comprehensiveness, which brings out the affinity between logic and philosophy, for to be comprehensive is the aim of philosophical ambition.
The book is not an unrestricted survey engaging a vast and repetative literature, but a systematic treatise within clear boundaries, largely a document of Afriat's own work. The original motive of the work is to elaborate a concept of what really is a price index, which, despite some kind of price-level notion having a presence throughout economics, in theory and practice, had been missing.
Originally published in 1923 Chance and Error examines the vagaries of chance, and how this is the result of the interference of yes and no. The book basis its examination of chance on the idea of a two-sided coin. The book stipulates that contradictories are head and tail, or yes and no. When the coin is flipped in the air yes normally wins half of the trials, but this includes half of the half that normally go to no. Thus, normally in one quarter of the trials there is an interference of yes and no. From this the chance of any number of heads or tails can be easily calculated, and all results that are attained by more difficult mathematics are secured. The book uses this idea to examine interference of yes and no in everyday life and argues that this causes the variations in everything that goes on around us in nature and in our daily life. This book will be of interest to philosophers of logic, as well as mathematicians.
This book is based on two premises: one cannot understand philosophy of mathematics without understanding mathematics and one cannot understand mathematics withoutdoing mathematics. It draws readers into philosophy of mathematics by having them do mathematics. It offers 298 exercises, covering philosophically important material, presented in a philosophically informed way. The exercises give readers opportunities to recreate some mathematics that will illuminate important readings in philosophy ofmathematics. Topics include primitive recursive arithmetic, Peano arithmetic, Godel's theorems, interpretability, the hierarchyof sets, Frege arithmetic and intuitionist sentential logic. The book is intended for readers who understand basic properties of the natural and realnumbers and have some background in formal logic."
A New World of Geometry Awaits Your Discovery! The last stone falls out ... a rush of ancient air ... the glint of gold ... the tingle of discovery ... When explorers first opened the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, they knew that they had discovered something wonderful. That feeling, that same passionate sense of discovery, is one of the most powerful educational tools a text can deliver. Geometry by Discovery is an exciting new approach to geometry. This ground-breaking text taps the pedagogical value of discovery to help students stretch their geometric perspective and hone their geometric intuition. It actively engages students in solving mathematical problems, and empowers them to be successful problem-solvers and discoverers of mathematical ideas.
This edited collection covers Friedrich Waismann's most influential contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of language: his concepts of open texture and language strata, his early criticism of verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction, as well as their significance for experimental and legal philosophy. In addition, Waismann's original papers in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics are here evaluated. They introduce Waismann's theory of action along with his groundbreaking work on fiction, proper names and Kafka's Trial. Waismann is known as the voice of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Vienna Circle. At the same time we find in his works a determined critic of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, who anticipated much later developments in the analytic tradition and devised his very own vision for its future.
During the first few decades of the twentieth century, philosophers
and mathematicians mounted a sustained effort to clarify the nature
of mathematics. This led to considerable discord, even enmity, and
yielded fascinating and fruitful work of both a mathematical and a
philosophical nature. It was one of the most exhilarating
intellectual adventures of the century, pursued at an
extraordinarily high level of acuity and imagination. Its legacy
principally consists of three original and finely articulated
programs that seek to view mathematics in the proper light:
logicism, intuitionism, and finitism. Each is notable for its
symbiotic melding together of philosophical vision and mathematical
work: the philosophical ideas are given their substance by specific
mathematical developments, which are in turn given their point by
philosophical reflection. This book provides an accessible, critical introduction to these
three projects as it describes and investigates both their
philosophical and their mathematical components. Solutions manual is available upon request.
Originally published in 1964. This book is concerned with general arguments, by which is meant broadly arguments that rely for their force on the ideas expressed by all, every, any, some, none and other kindred words or phrases. A main object of quantificational logic is to provide methods for evaluating general arguments. To evaluate a general argument by these methods we must first express it in a standard form. Quantificational form is dealt with in chapter one and in part of chapter three; in the remainder of the book an account is given of methods by which arguments when formulated quantificationally may be tested for validity or invalidity. Some attention is also paid to the logic of identity and of definite descriptions. Throughout the book an attempt has been made to give a clear explanation of the concepts involved and the symbols used; in particular a step-by-step and partly mechanical method is developed for translating complicated statements of ordinary discourse into the appropriate quantificational formulae. Some elementary knowledge of truth-functional logic is presupposed.
Originally published in 1973. This book is directed to the student of philosophy whose background in mathematics is very limited. The author strikes a balance between material of a philosophical and a formal kind, and does this in a way that will bring out the intricate connections between the two. On the formal side, he gives particular care to provide the basic tools from set theory and arithmetic that are needed to study systems of logic, setting out completeness results for two, three, and four valued logic, explaining concepts such as freedom and bondage in quantificational logic, describing the intuitionistic conception of the logical operators, and setting out Zermelo's axiom system for set theory. On the philosophical side, he gives particular attention to such topics as the problem of entailment, the import of the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem, the expressive powers of quantificational logic, the ideas underlying intuitionistic logic, the nature of set theory, and the relationship between logic and set theory. There are exercises within the text, set out alongside the theoretical ideas that they involve.
Originally published in 1962. This book gives an account of the concepts and methods of a basic part of logic. In chapter I elementary ideas, including those of truth-functional argument and truth-functional validity, are explained. Chapter II begins with a more comprehensive account of truth-functionality; the leading characteristics of the most important monadic and dyadic truth-functions are described, and the different notations in use are set forth. The main part of the book describes and explains three different methods of testing truth-functional aguments and agument forms for validity: the truthtable method, the deductive method and the method of normal forms; for the benefit mainly of readers who have not acquired in one way or another a general facility in the manipulation of symbols some of the procedures have been described in rather more detail than is common in texts of this kind. In the final chapter the author discusses and rejects the view, based largely on the so called paradoxes of material implication, that truth-functional logic is not applicable in any really important way to arguments of ordinary discourse.
Originally published in 1962. A clear and simple account of the growth and structure of Mathematical Logic, no earlier knowledge of logic being required. After outlining the four lines of thought that have been its roots - the logic of Aristotle, the idea of all the parts of mathematics as systems to be designed on the same sort of plan as that used by Euclid and his Elements, and the discoveries in algebra and geometry in 1800-1860 - the book goes on to give some of the main ideas and theories of the chief writers on Mathematical Logic: De Morgan, Boole, Jevons, Pierce, Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Russell, Post, Hilbert and Goebel. Written to assist readers who require a general picture of current logic, it will also be a guide for those who will later be going more deeply into the expert details of this field.
Originally published in 1937. A short account of the traditional logic, intended to provide the student with the fundamentals necessary for the specialized study. Suitable for working through individualy, it will provide sufficient knowledge of the elements of the subject to understand materials on more advanced and specialized topics. This is an interesting historic perspective on this area of philosophy and mathematics.
Originally published in 1966. Professor Rescher's aim is to develop a "logic of commands" in exactly the same general way which standard logic has already developed a "logic of truth-functional statement compounds" or a "logic of quantifiers". The object is to present a tolerably accurate and precise account of the logically relevant facets of a command, to study the nature of "inference" in reasonings involving commands, and above all to establish a viable concept of validity in command inference, so that the logical relationships among commands can be studied with something of the rigour to which one is accustomed in other branches of logic.
Originally published in 1934. This fourth edition originally published 1954., revised by C. W. K. Mundle. "It must be the desire of every reasonable person to know how to justify a contention which is of sufficient importance to be seriously questioned. The explicit formulation of the principles of sound reasoning is the concern of Logic". This book discusses the habit of sound reasoning which is acquired by consciously attending to the logical principles of sound reasoning, in order to apply them to test the soundness of arguments. It isn't an introduction to logic but it encourages the practice of logic, of deciding whether reasons in argument are sound or unsound. Stress is laid upon the importance of considering language, which is a key instrument of our thinking and is imperfect.
A conversation between Euclid and the ghost of Socrates. . . the paths of the moon and the sun charted by the stone-builders of ancient Europe. . .the Greek ideal of the golden mean by which they measured beauty. . . Combining historical fact with a retelling of ancient myths and legends, this lively and engaging book describes the historical, religious and geographical background that gave rise to mathematics in ancient Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, India, and the Arab world. Each chapter contains a case study where mathematics is applied to the problems of the era, including the area of triangles and volume of the Egyptian pyramids; the Babylonian sexagesimal number system and our present measure of space and time which grew out of it; the use of the abacus and remainder theory in China; the invention of trigonometry by Arab mathematicians; and the solution of quadratic equations by completing the square developed in India. These insightful commentaries will give mathematicians and general historians a better understanding of why and how mathematics arose from the problems of everyday life, while the author's easy, accessible writing style will open fascinating chapters in the history of mathematics to a wide audience of general readers.
This volume collects 22 essays on the history of logic written by outstanding specialists in the field. The book was originally prompted by the 2018-2019 celebrations in honor of Massimo Mugnai, a world-renowned historian of logic, whose contributions on Medieval and Modern logic, and to the understanding of the logical writings of Leibniz in particular, have shaped the field in the last four decades. Given the large number of recent contributions in the history of logic that have some connections or debts with Mugnai's work, the editors have attempted to produce a volume showing the vastness of the development of logic throughout the centuries. We hope that such a volume may help both the specialist and the student to realize the complexity of the history of logic, the large array of problems that were touched by the discipline, and the manifold relations that logic entertained with other subjects in the course of the centuries. The contributions of the volume, in fact, span from Antiquity to the Modern Age, from semantics to linguistics and proof theory, from the discussion of technical problems to deep metaphysical questions, and in it the history of logic is kept in dialogue with the history of mathematics, economics, and the moral sciences at large.
Spherical Geometry and Its Applications introduces spherical geometry and its practical applications in a mathematically rigorous form. The text can serve as a course in spherical geometry for mathematics majors. Readers from various academic backgrounds can comprehend various approaches to the subject. The book introduces an axiomatic system for spherical geometry and uses it to prove the main theorems of the subject. It also provides an alternate approach using quaternions. The author illustrates how a traditional axiomatic system for plane geometry can be modified to produce a different geometric world - but a geometric world that is no less real than the geometric world of the plane. Features: A well-rounded introduction to spherical geometry Provides several proofs of some theorems to appeal to larger audiences Presents principal applications: the study of the surface of the earth, the study of stars and planets in the sky, the study of three- and four-dimensional polyhedra, mappings of the sphere, and crystallography Many problems are based on propositions from the ancient text Sphaerica of Menelaus
A lively and engaging look at logic puzzles and their role in mathematics, philosophy, and recreation Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself. In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Goedel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data. Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever," metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.
Change-point problems arise in a variety of experimental and mathematical sciences, as well as in engineering and health sciences. This rigorously researched text provides a comprehensive review of recent probabilistic methods for detecting various types of possible changes in the distribution of chronologically ordered observations. Further developing the already well-established theory of weighted approximations and weak convergence, the authors provide a thorough survey of parametric and non-parametric methods, regression and time series models together with sequential methods. All but the most basic models are carefully developed with detailed proofs, and illustrated by using a number of data sets. Contains a thorough survey of:
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