The Old New Logic

by Oderberg, David S.; Strawson, P. F.

• ISBN13: 9780262151139
• ISBN10: 0262151138
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years, the philosopher Fred Sommers has taken on the monumental task of reviving the development of Aristotelian (syllogistic) logic after it was supplanted by the predicate logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The enormousness of Sommers's undertaking can be gauged by the fact that most philosophers had come to believe-as David S. Oderberg writes in his preface-that "Aristotelian logic was good but is now as good as dead." A revival of traditional syllogistic logic would involve not only its restatement but its refashioning into a system that could rival the elegance and deductive power of predicate logic. Building on work by medieval scholastic logicians, Leibniz, and nineteenth-century algebraic logicians, Sommers accomplished this renovation and rehabilitation of syllogistic logic with his magnum opus The Logic of Natural Language, published in 1982. In The Old New Logic, essays by a diverse group of contributors show how widely influential Sommers's work has been-not only in logic, but in category theory and other areas. Scholars in psychology, linguistics, and computer science join philosophers and logicians in discussing aspects of Sommers's contributions to philosophy. Sommers himself provides an intellectual autobiography at the beginning and in the final chapter offers comments on the contributions. This collection should help bring to Sommers's work the attention it deserves from the wider philosophical and intellectual community.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. vii
Forward	p. xi
Intellectual Autobiography	p. 1
Trees, Terms, and Truth: The Philosophy of Fred Sommers	p. 25
Syntax and Ontology: Reflections on Three Logical Systems	p. 49
Exploring Boundary Conditions on the Structure of Knowledge: Some Nonobvious Influences of Philosophy on Psychology	p. 67
General Terms, Anaphora, and Rigid Designation	p. 85
The Syntax and Semantics of English Prepositional Phrases	p. 101
Modeling Anaphora in TFL	p. 111
An Elementary Term Logic for Physically Realizable Models of Information	p. 135
Sommer's Cancellation Technique and the Method of Resolution	p. 169
Predicate Logic and Bare Particulars	p. 183
Comments and Replies	p. 211
Works	p. 233
Contributors	p. 237
Index	p. 239
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