Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: logic

  • Frege’s View of the World

    by Mark English ____ Gottlob Frege was a mathematician with strong philosophical interests and preoccupations. In an attempt to discover and make explicit the logical foundations of mathematics he developed — almost singlehandedly — the basic ideas of the predicate calculus. But he also had deep and compelling views on language and an appreciation of…

  • Metaphysics, Metacognition, Language and Number

    by Mark English The logical positivists took a very hard anti-metaphysical line. They were right, in my view, to see traditional metaphysics as being futile and pointless. The essential problem with metaphysics is epistemic. How (given a basically scientific view of the world) can purely metaphysical statements be justified? Rudolf Carnap and most of his…

  • Notes on Rhetoric

    by E. John Winner Words are instructions or directions for behavior, and they may be responded to either appropriately or inappropriately, but the appropriateness or inappropriateness depends upon the judgment of someone. — Morse Peckham (1) A dialogue between  a rhetorician and a logician R–Let’s say we have one audience that sets stock in logic-based…

  • Popper on Logic and Truth

    by Mark English It is often said that the foundations of logic are the conventions that we (as users of logic) agree upon. I see problems with this view. For a start, the word ‘logic’ is used in different ways. It is often used to refer to formal logic and applications and developments thereof, but…

  • Hegel’s Logical Consciousness

    E. John Winner The knowledge, which is at the start or immediately our object, can be nothing else than just that which is immediate knowledge, knowledge of the immediate, of what is. We have, in dealing with it, to proceed, too, in an immediate way, to accept what is given, not altering anything in it…