Pesky Essays on the Logic of Philosophy

Pesky Essays on the Logic of Philosophy
Author: Kenneth G. Lucey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2014-11-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319080636

This collection of essays explores the philosophy of human knowledge from a multitude of perspectives, with a particular emphasis upon the justification component of the classical analysis of knowledge and with an excursion along the way to explore the role of knowledge in Texas Hold ‘Em poker. An important theme of the collection is the role of knowledge in religion, including a detailed argument for agnosticism. A number of the essays touch upon issues in philosophical logic, among them a fascinating new counter-example to Modus Ponens. The collection is rounded out with essays on causality and the philosophy of mind. The author’s perspective on the philosophy of human knowledge is fresh and challenging, as evidenced by essays entitled “On Epistemic Preferability;” “On Being Unjustified;” “The Logic of ‘Unless’” and “Is ‘This sentence is true.’ True?” An interesting feature of The Logic of Philosophy: Pesky Essays is the inclusion of responses to several of its key essays, contributed by such prominent contemporary philosophers as Roderick Chisholm, Ted Sider and Tomas Kapitan.

Essays on Actions and Events

Essays on Actions and Events
Author: Donald Davidson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2001-09-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199246262

Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays.

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life
Author: Cora Diamond
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2007
Genre: Ethics, Modern
ISBN: 0262532867

Essays by leading scholars that take as their point of departure Cora Diamond's work on the unity of Wittgenstein's thought and her writings on moral philosophy.

Philosophical Essays, Volume 1

Philosophical Essays, Volume 1
Author: Scott Soames
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2008-12-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400837847

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics--including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

Essays on Realist Instance Ontology and its Logic

Essays on Realist Instance Ontology and its Logic
Author: Donald W. Mertz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-04-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110333236

Structure or system is a ubiquitous and uneliminable feature of all our experience and theory, and requires an ontological analysis. The essays collected in this volume provide an account of structure founded upon the proper analysis of polyadic relations as the irreducible and defining elements of structure. It is argued that polyadic relations are ontic predicates in the insightful sense of intension-determined agent-combinators, monadic properties being the limiting and historically misleading case. This assay of ontic predicates has a number of powerful explanatory implications, including fundamentally: providing ontology with a principium individuationis, demonstrating the perennial theory that properties and relations are individuated as unit attributes or ‘instances’, giving content to the ontology of facts or states of affairs, and providing a means to precisely differentiate identity from indiscernibility. The differentiation of the unrepeatable combinatorial and repeatable intension aspects of ontic predicates makes it possible to properly diagnose and disarm the classis Bradley Regress Argument aimed against attributes and universals, an argument that trades on confusing these aspects. It is argued that these two aspects of ontic predicates form a ‘composite simple’, an explanation that sheds light on the nature and necessity of the medieval formal distinction, e.g., the distinctio formalis a parte rei of Scotus. Following from this analysis of ontic predication there is given a number of principles delineating realist instance ontology, together with a critique of both nominalistic trope theory and modern revivals of Aristotle’s instance ontology of the Categories. It is shown how the resulting theory of facts can, via ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ composition, account for all the hierarchical structuring of our experience and theory, and, importantly, how this can rest upon an atomic ontic level composed of only dependent ontic predicates. The latter is a desideratum for the proposed ‘Structural Realism’ ontology for micro-physics where at its lowest level the physical is said to be totally relational/structural. Nullified is the classic and insidious assumption that dependent entities presuppose a class of independent substrata or ‘substances’, and with this any pressure to admit ‘bare particulars’ and intensionless relations or ‘ties’. The logic inherent in realist instance ontology-termed ‘PPL’-is formalized in detail and given a consistency proof. Demonstrated is the logic’s power to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate impredicative definitions, and in this how it provides a general solution to the classic self-referential paradoxes. PPL corresponds to Gödel’s programmatic ‘Theory of Concepts’. The last essay, not previously published, provides a detailed differentiation of identity from indiscernibility, preliminary to which is given an explanation of in what sense a predicate logic presupposes an ontology of predication. The principles needed for the differentiation have the significant implication (e.g., for the foundations of mathematics) of implying an infinity of logical entities, viz., instances of the identity relation.

Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry

Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry
Author: Eric Scerri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2016-04-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0190494603

The philosophy of chemistry has emerged in recent years as a new and autonomous field within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. With the development of this new discipline, Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher's "Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry" is a timely and definitive guide to all current thought in this field. This edited volume will serve to map out the distinctive features of the field and its connections to the philosophies of the natural sciences and general philosophy of science more broadly. It will be a reference for students and professional alike. Both the philosophy of chemistry and philosophies of scientific practice alike reflect the splitting of analytical and continental scholastic traditions, and some philosophers are turning for inspiration from the familiar resources of analytical philosophy to influences from the continental tradition and pragmatism. While philosophy of chemistry is practiced very much within the familiar analytical tradition, it is also capable of trail-blazing new philosophical approaches. In such a way, the seemingly disparate disciplines such as the "hard sciences" and philosophy become much more linked.

Modalities : Philosophical Essays

Modalities : Philosophical Essays
Author: Ruth Barcan Marcus Rueben Post Halleck Professor of Philosophy Yale University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 285
Release: 1993-07-29
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0198023960

Based on her earlier ground-breaking axiomatization of quantified modal logic, the papers collected here by the distinguished philosopher Ruth Barcan Marcus cover much ground in the development of her thought, spanning from 1961 to 1990. The first essay here introduces themes initially viewed as iconoclastic, such as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the Barcan Formula about the interplay of possibility and existence, and alternative interpretations of quantification. Marcus also addresses the putative puzzles about substitutivity and about essentialism. The collection also includes influential essays on moral conflict, on belief and rationality, and on some historical figures. Many of her views have been incorporated into current theories, while others remain part of a continuing debate.

An Introduction to Formal Logic

An Introduction to Formal Logic
Author: Peter Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2003-11-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780521008044

Formal logic provides us with a powerful set of techniques for criticizing some arguments and showing others to be valid. These techniques are relevant to all of us with an interest in being skilful and accurate reasoners. In this highly accessible book, Peter Smith presents a guide to the fundamental aims and basic elements of formal logic. He introduces the reader to the languages of propositional and predicate logic, and then develops formal systems for evaluating arguments translated into these languages, concentrating on the easily comprehensible 'tree' method. His discussion is richly illustrated with worked examples and exercises. A distinctive feature is that, alongside the formal work, there is illuminating philosophical commentary. This book will make an ideal text for a first logic course, and will provide a firm basis for further work in formal and philosophical logic.

Topics in Philosophical Logic

Topics in Philosophical Logic
Author: N. Rescher
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401735468

The aim of the book is to introduce the reader to some new areas oflogic which have yet to find their way into the bulk of modern logic books written from the more orthodox direction of the mainstream of develop ments. Such a work seems to me much needed, both because of the in trinsic value and increasing prominence of the nonstandard sector of logic, and because this particular sector is of the greatest interest from the standpoint of philosophical implications and applications. This book unites a series of studies in philosophical logic, drawing for the most part on material which I have contributed to the journal liter ature of the subject over the past ten years. Despite the fact that some of these essays have been published in various journals at different times, they possess a high degree of thematic and methodological unity. All of these studies deal with material of substantial current interest in philo sophical logic and embody a fusion of the modern techniques of logical and linguistic-philosophical analysis for the exploration of areas of logic that are of substantial philosophical relevance.