This book discusses and aims to clarify the issue of describing conduct and character as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The book states that one of the main factors that have made this issue obscure is the illusion of some anti-naturalists that purely logical considerations can settle it. It clearly defines the limitations of the discussions: it is not concerned with the ‘other things’ people use to define conduct and character. The book attempts to consider the issue (...) from the purely logician point of view and suggests to the naturalists and anti-naturalists how their positions may be freed from logical faults. The book also introduces the ‘logic of ethics’, which is not a special kind or branch of logic, but rather an application of it. (shrink)

A key to modern studies of 18th century Western philosophy, the Treatise considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity and morality. This abridged edition has an introduction which explain's Hume's thought and places it in the context of its times.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

The paper presents an infinite hierarchy of sound and complete axiomatic systems for Two-Dimensional Modal Tense Logic with Historical Necessity, Agents and Acts. A main novelty of these logics is their capacity to represent formally (i) basic action-sentences asserting that such and such an act is performed/omitted by an agent, as well as (ii) causative action-sentences asserting that by performing/omitting a certain act, an agent causes that such and such a state-of-affairs is realized (e.g. comes about/ceases/remains/remains absent). We illustrate how (...) the formal machinery of our systems can be used to reconstruct a number of interesting ideas in the Logic of Agency and Action that have been proposed by authors like von Wright, von Kutschera, Belnap and Segerberg. (shrink)

We extend the monotonic and regular modal logics to the multi-modal cue, and give semantical characterization w.r.t. a semantics of minimal frames. For this we introduce a calculus over neighbourhoods and we obtain simpler conditions than those from the literature.

This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts, Expression and Meaning and Intentionality. In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a general (...) theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic. (shrink)

Explains the concept of legal competence (or power). This book then discusses the analysis and definition of legal concepts in general; the relation between the concept of competence and (in)validity; what it means to exercise competence; different types of competence; and competence norms.