This article outlines the work of a group of US mathematicians called the American Postulate Theorists and their influence on Tarski's work in the 1930s that was to be foundational for model theory. The American Postulate Theorists were influenced by the European foundational work of the period around 1900, such as that of Peano and Hilbert. In the period roughly from 1900???1940, they developed an indigenous American approach to foundational investigations. This made use of interpretations of precisely formulated axiomatic theories (...) to prove such metatheoretic properties as independence, consistency, categoricity and, in some cases, completeness of axiom sets. This approach to foundations was in many respects similar to that later taken by Tarski, who frequently cites the work of American Postulate Theorists. Their work served as paradigm examples of the theories and concepts investigated in model theory. The article also examines the possibility of a more specific impetus to Tarski's model theoretic investigation, arising from his having studied in 1927???1929 a paper by C. H. Langford proving completeness for various axiom sets for linear orders. This used the method of elimination of quantifiers. The article concludes with an examination of one example of Langford's methods to indicate how their correct formulation seems to call for model-theoretic concepts. (shrink)

Articles by two American mathematicians, E. V. Huntington and Oswald Veblen, are discussed as examples of a movement in foundational research in the period 1900-1930 called American postulate theory. This movement also included E. H. Moore, R. L. Moore, C. H. Langford, H. M. Sheffer, C. J. Keyser, and others. The articles discussed exemplify American postulate theorists' standards for axiomatizations of mathematical theories, and their investigations of such axiomatizations with respect to metatheoretic properties such as independence, completeness, and consistency.

E. Beltrami in 1868 did not intend to prove the consistency of non-euclidean plane geometry nor the independence of the euclidean parallel postulate. His approach would have been unsuccessful if so intended. J. Hoüel in 1870 described the relevance of Beltrami's work to the issue of the independence of the euclidean parallel postulate. Hoüel's method is different from the independence proofs using reinterpretation of terms deployed by Peano about 1890, chiefly in using a fixed interpretation for non-logical terms. Comparing the (...) work of Beltrami and Hoüel with the treatment of non-euclidean geometry after the development of the axiomatic method in the 1890s indicates an important shift in mathematicians? attitudes towards mathematical theories. (shrink)

Articles by two American mathematicians, E. V. Huntington and Oswald Veblen, are discussed as examples of a movement in foundational research in the period 1900-1930 called American postulate theory. This movement also included E. H. Moore, R. L. Moore, C. H. Langford, H. M. Sheffer, C. J. Keyser, and others. The articles discussed exemplify American postulate theorists' standards for axiomatizations of mathematical theories, and their investigations of such axiomatizations with respect to metatheoretic properties such as independence, completeness, and consistency.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 eviews THE DENOTING CENTURY, 1 19 90 05 5– –2 20 00 05 5 Michael Scanlan Philosophy / Oregon State U. Corvallis, or 97331, usa [email protected] Guido Imaguire and Bernard Linsky, eds. On Denoting: 1905–2005. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2005. Pp. 451. 98.00. isbn 3-88405-091-5. his anniversary collection of papers connected with Russell’s 1905 publiTcation of “On Denoting” reflects both (...) the almost mythic status that paper has achieved in analytic philosophy and the quite variegated nature of the significance that philosophers have seen in it. The papers in this collection break down roughly into two sorts. There are those which take a historical approach and attempt to explicate various aspects of the content of the OD article. The other sort might be labelled “application” papers in which Russell’s analysis in OD is seen as a tool or a model for subsequent philosophical work, in the spirit of Ramsey’s much quoted “paradigm of philosophy” remark. The volume opens with a reprint of the OD text with pagination indicated for the original Mind printing, for the text in Collected Papers 4 and for the widely referenced Logic and Knowledge Russell collection edited by R. C. Marsh. The Mind and Papers texts use the American convention of single quotation marks within double quotation marks. The Marsh edition (and the text given here) uses the inverse British convention. Readers need to be aware that paper authors here, and elsewhere, vary in which text they cite. The end of the volume has a comprehensive 21-page bibliography of the secondary literature. In between there are thirteen papers. I will be rather brief with the “application” papers, since I believe that Russell readers will tend to favour the more historically oriented papers. Some of the application papers wander quite far afield from Russell’s treatment of definite descriptions. For instance the paper by Thomas Mormann on “Description, Construction and Representation from Russell and Carnap to Stone” takes off from Russell’s assertion that his theory of descriptions was an early version of his subsequent interest in substituting “constructions” for “inferred entities” such as space-time points. The paper is almost exclusively a (worthwhile and mathematically astute) analysis of Russell’s efforts along these lines in Our russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 26 (winter 2006–07): 167–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631 _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 168 Reviews Knowledge of the External World and The Analysis of Matter. The author argues that Russell’s constructions did not actually achieve the effects he wanted, but that (curiously) they can be properly developed within the later framework of topological spaces developed by Marshall Stone in 1937. The paper by Guido Imaguire, “Theory of Descriptions and Inferential Semantics”, explicitly eschews an “exegetical” approach and allies itself with a “systematical approach, in which one analyses possible new features and extensions of the proposed theory” (p. 397). The extension considered here is to “inferential semantics”, especially that of Robert Brandom. The spirit of this approach is to take the semantics of a language to be determined by the set of allowed inferences within that language. Imaguire takes as an essential lesson of Russell’s theory of descriptions that definite descriptions and proper names cannot be treated as singular terms of a language in the same manner. He goes on to argue for a criterion for distinguishing proper names from definite descriptions based on inferences allowed between sentences containing them, and he takes this distinction to argue for a modification of Brandom’s treatment of singular terms in his inferential semantics. Elena Tatievskaya’s paper on “Russell’s Theory of Descriptions and Wittgenstein on Internal Properties of Propositions” is another paper that is mainly about something other than Russell and his theory of descriptions. It is a very detailed study of Wittgenstein’s attempt to make good on his claim that the logical symbols of propositional logic notation, such as v and ~, do not correspond to “logical” components of propositions (Tractatus... (shrink)

Jonathan Lear has suggested that Aristotle attempts to demonstrate a proof-theoretic analogue of a compactness theorem in Posterior analyticsI, chs. 19?22. Aristotle argues in these chapters that there cannot be in finite series of predications of terms. Lear's analysis of Aristotle's arguments are shown to be based on confusions about the nature of infinite orderings. Three distinct confusions are identified. In final remarks, it is suggested that a compactness claim is irrelevant to the issues which motivate Aristotle's arguments.

History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 32, Issue 4, Page 405, November 2011.

Although it is eommon to attribute to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus a treatment of general propositions as equivalent to eonjunctions and disjunctions of instance propositions, the evidence for this is not perfeetly clear. This article considers Wittgenstein’s comments in 5.521, which can be read as rejecting such a treatment. It argues that properly situating the Tractatus historically allows for a revised reading of 5.521 and other parts of the Tractatus relevant to Wittgenstein’s theory of generality. The result is that 5.521 (...) does not conflict with the view that general propositions are truth-functions of instance propositions. Common problems with such a view are to some extent obviated by the fact that Wittgenstein, following Russell and Moore, was not concerned with a syntactically defined language, but with propositions conceived as independent of a fixed language. (shrink)

Although it is eommon to attribute to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus a treatment of general propositions as equivalent to eonjunctions and disjunctions of instance propositions, the evidence for this is not perfeetly clear. This article considers Wittgenstein’s comments in 5.521, which can be read as rejecting such a treatment. It argues that properly situating the Tractatus historically allows for a revised reading of 5.521 and other parts of the Tractatus relevant to Wittgenstein’s theory of generality. The result is that 5.521 (...) does not conflict with the view that general propositions are truth-functions of instance propositions. Common problems with such a view are to some extent obviated by the fact that Wittgenstein, following Russell and Moore, was not concerned with a syntactically defined language, but with propositions conceived as independent of a fixed language. (shrink)

A case from 1996 in Oregon in which citizens' legally publicmotor vehicle information was disseminated on a World Wide Website is considered. The case evoked widespread moral outrageamong Oregonians and led to changes in the Oregon records laws.The application of either consequentialist ornon-consequentialist moral theories to this and otherinformational privacy cases is found to be inadequate.Adjudication of conflicting desires is offered as the appropriateanalytical model for moral disputes. The notion of adjudicationoffered here diverges from traditional moral theories in itsindeterminate nature.

We present a memorial summary of the professional life and contributions to logic of John Corcoran. We also provide a full list of his many publications.Courtesy of Lynn Corcoran.

Henry Sheffer’s 1908 Harvard Ph.D. thesis contains an interesting appendix on a central feature of the logical work of his thesis advisor, Josiah Royce. This is the claim in Royce’s 1905 article “The Relations of the Principles of Logic to the Foundations of Geometry” that an unsymmetric ordering relation can be defined on the single symmetric O-relation for which he gives postulates in that paper. Sheffer criticizes Royce’s specific definition from the point of view of the evolving twentieth century conception (...) of axiomatic method and also shows more generally that an unsymmetric1 order relation cannot be defined in the system of the 1905 paper based on the O-relation. In this article I wish to consider the nature.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 25, 2010 (2:45 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 30 (summer 2010): 69–94 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 eviews RUSSELL VS.z MEINONG, 100 YEARS LATER Michael Scanlan South StraTord, vt 05070, usa [email protected] Nicholas GriUn and Dale Jacquette, eds. Russell vs. Meinong: the Legacy of “On Denoting”. London (...) and New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. xiii, 384. isbn: 978-0-415-96364-0 (hb); 978-0-203-88802-5 (e-bk). £70.00; us$103.00. The background for the conference in 2005 at McMaster University from which these papers come is a 50-year period in anglophone philosophy during which Russell was portrayed as having put to rest the urge, exempliWed by Meinong, to have an intentional object for every thought. Beginning roughly in the 1970s, analytic philosophers began publishing work more sympathetic to both the speciWcs of Meinong and his general concerns. Some landmark publications in this vein are Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (1980), and Richard Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond (1980). The development of more sophisticated accounts of Meinong, along with developments in Russell studies, has resulted in a more nuanced presentation of Meinong’s thought in recent literature, including this volume. There is one article in this collection which is explicitly devoted to comparing the views of the historical Russell and Meinong. This is “Psychological Content and Indeterminacy with Respect to Being” by J. C. Marek. The title indicates the two topics examined. Meinong was in the tradition of Brentano in seeing a mental state of presentation (Vorstellungz) as combining a mental act and a mental content. A presentation may or may not also have a presented object. Russell, famously, thought of the state corresponding to Meinong’s presentations as a relation called “direct acquaintance” that comes to exist, or ceases to exist, between a mind and objects. There is no place here for non-existent objects. There is very little to say about Russell’s theory of direct acquaintance and most of that is familiar to English-speaking readers, so Marek rightly devotes himself to expounding Meinong’s views on presentational content. The problem here is whether such content exists. Meinong averred he could introspect such content, and Russell averred that he could not. Beyond such fruitless personal testimony, Meinong oTered arguments for the explanatory value of presentational content. September 25, 2010 (2:45 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 70 Reviews One is as an explanation of how we could have presentations (thoughts ofy) nonexistent objects, e.g. the $1,000 in my pocket. Of course, Russell treats this with his theory of descriptions. Another such argument for mental content by Meinong is that it is needed to account for the diTerence in mental state when presented with diTerent objects. Russell says that when the mind is in relation to the distinct objects the distinctness of the objects guarantees two distinct relations of acquaintance. This leaves unclear what the mental diTerence is between seeing a red patch and seeing a blue patch. The separate discussion ofthe Meinong/Mally “indiTerence” of the “pure object ” or object itself as to whether it exists or not is a topic that is canvassed more in the anglophone literature. In Meinong’s 1904 formulation “the present king of France” doesn’t now exist, but if the French have a revolution then a “present ” king of France might exist in 2011. In either case there is an object of thought/reference, and it has (indiTerently) the character (Soseinz) of being king of France. Marek’s exposition in this area focuses on the various technical devices Meinong introduced in 1915 to mitigate the problems caused by allowing for the being of “impossible” objects such as the round square. In “Meditations on Meinong’s Golden Mountain”, Dale Jacquette oTers the traditional dramatic classroom story about Russell and OD. On this account, prior to 1905 Russell is a committed Meinongian who... (shrink)

This book is intended for an undergraduate student who has taken one introductory course in first-order logic.1 It focuses on great figures and periods: Aristotle, the Stoics, the medieval logician...

Most readers will consult this volume for one or two of the articles in it. However, reading through the volume as a whole gives an interesting perspective on research in this area. I will briefly...

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...) in a collaborative way such that their actions are rationally guided by a prior shared intention. This understanding of joint attention – as having a key functional role of enabling the rational guidance of joint intentional action by a prior shared intention – allows for an alternative understanding of the kind of minimal cooperation that infants can engage in. On this understanding, infants’ capacity to engage in joint actions is already an incipient capacity to engage in rational and intentional joint actions, albeit a capacity that is necessarily scaffolded by an adult rational co-partner. (shrink)

This a clear and concise introduction to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.ichael Watts uses Kierkegaard's own writings to introduce his theoriesbout living a truthfu; and spiritual life, while explaining the enormousnfluence of the philosopher's personal life on his work and beliefs. As theounder of 20th century existentialism, and the first philosopher to definehe idea of angst, Kierkegaard's profound influence on modern life is clearlyefined in accessible terms in this guide for students and general readers.

Common knowledge is ubiquitous in our lives and yet there remains considerable uncertainty about how to model or understand it. Standard analyses of common knowledge end up being challenged by either regress or circularity which then give rise to well-known paradoxes of practical reasoning, such as the Two Generals’ Paradox. This paper argues that the nature and utility of common knowledge can be illuminated by appeal to Wittgenstein’s Hinge Epistemology. It is argued that those things that we standardly think of (...) as being common knowledge in our lives are the same as those that Wittgenstein identified as hinge certainties. This identification of common knowledge with hinge certainties allows us to resolve the regress problem for common knowledge and explain how the Two Generals’ Paradox arises. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that the sunk cost effect is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent (...) to mimic a resolute chooser, someone who adopts the best plan at the outset of a decision problem and sticks with it, even when resoluteness is unfeasible. I discuss several kinds of cases in which honoring sunk costs coincides with resolute choice. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive (...) phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In 'The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space', Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to makensense of this conundrum. (shrink)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

A particular feature of this book is substantial "Stretch and Challenge" material throughout which allows students to develop further.

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an (...) added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation. (shrink)

Als Philosoph, Literat, Prediger und Pädagoge gehört Herder zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der Weimarer Klassik. Diese aktuelle und kenntnisreiche Biografie bringt Leben und Werk Herders einem breiteren Publikum nahe.

In softening Marx' economic determinism, Engels appears to have rescued it from absurdity. In fact, he has condemned it to vacuity: it seems to explain everything, while in fact explaining nothing.