You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Philosophers since Aristotle have traditionally held that impossibilities make up the nature of logic. Sanford Shieh investigates an important but underexplored break with this tradition: Frege and Russell questioned whether there really are such things as possibilities or necessities, and sought the foundations of logic elsewhere.
A long tradition, going back to Aristotle, conceives of logic in terms of necessity and possibility: a deductive argument is correct if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when the premises are true. A relatively unknown feature of the analytic tradition in philosophy is that, at its very inception, this venerable conception of the relation between logic and necessity and possibility - the concepts of modality - was put into question. The founders of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, held that these concepts are empty: there are no genuine distinctions among the necessary, the possible, and the actual. In this book, the first of two volumes, Sanford Shieh...
This volume discusses some crucial ideas of the founders of the analytic philosophy: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the ‘golden trio’. The book shows how these ‘old’ ideas are still present and influential in the current philosophical debates and to what extent these debates echo the original ideas. The collection aim is twofold: to better understand these fruitful ideas by placing them in the original setting, and to systematically examine these ideas in the context of the current debates animating philosophical discussions today. Divided into five sections, the book first sets the stage and offers a general introduction to the background influences, as ...
This collection of previously unpublished essays presents a new approach to the history of analytic philosophy--one that does not assume at the outset a general characterization of the distinguishing elements of the analytic tradition. Drawing together a venerable group of contributors, including John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, this volume explores the historical contexts in which analytic philosophers have worked, revealing multiple discontinuities and misunderstandings as well as a complex interaction between science and philosophical reflection.
In this exciting new collection, a distinguished international group of philosophers contribute new essays on central issues in philosophy of language and logic, in honor of Michael Dummett, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. The essays are focused on areas particularly associated with Professor Dummett. Five are contributions to the philosophy of language, addressing in particular the nature of truth and meaning and the relation between language and thought. Two contributors discuss time, in particular the reality of the past. The last four essays focus on Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. The volume represents some of the best work in contemporary analytical philosophy.
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This volume documents a lively exchange between five philosophers of mathematics. It also introduces a new voice in one central debate in the philosophy of mathematics. Non-realism, i.e., the view supported by Hugly and Sayward in their monograph, is an original position distinct from the widely known realism and anti-realism. Non-realism is characterized by the rejection of a central assumption shared by many realists and anti-realists, i.e., the assumption that mathematical statements purport to refer to objects. The defense of their main argument for the thesis that arithmetic lacks ontology brings the authors to discuss also the controversial contrast between pure and empirical arithmeti...
For many philosophers, modern philosophy begins in 1879 with the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift, in which Frege presents the first truly modern logic in his symbolic language, Begriffsschrift, or concept-script. Macbeth's book, the first full-length study of this language, offers a highly original new reading of Frege's logic based directly on Frege's own two-dimensional notation and his various writings about logic.
"Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities such as necessity and possibility. In particular, the concepts of necessity and 'what must be' played an important role in Pre-Socratic thought. For example, Anaximander maintained that things perish into that from which they came to be 'in accordance with what must be' (kata to chreôn). Heraclitus held that 'everything comes about in accordance with strife and what must be (kat' erin kai chreôn)'. In his poem, Parmenides asserts that what is (to eon) is entirely still and changeless because 'powerful Necessity (Anagkê) holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all ar...
The relation between logic and knowledge has been at the heart of a lively debate since the 1960s. On the one hand, the epistemic approaches based their formal arguments in the mathematics of Brouwer and intuitionistic logic. Following Michael Dummett, they started to call themselves `antirealists'. Others persisted with the formal background of the Frege-Tarski tradition, where Cantorian set theory is linked via model theory to classical logic. Jaakko Hintikka tried to unify both traditions by means of what is now known as `explicit epistemic logic'. Under this view, epistemic contents are introduced into the object language as operators yielding propositions from propositions, rather than ...