DOCSLIB.ORG

Neo-Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian Ontology: the Logical Form of the Proposition, Philosophical Explanation, and Categorial Thought

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Neo-Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian Ontology: the Logical Form of the Proposition, Philosophical Explanation, and Categorial Thought NEO-ARISTOTELIAN-WITTGENSTEINIAN ONTOLOGY: THE LOGICAL FORM OF THE PROPOSITION, PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATION, AND CATEGORIAL THOUGHT by Alexander James A dissertation submitted to Johns HopKins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2015 © 2015 Alexander James All Rights Reserved Abstract If we regard the investigation into “grammar” and “ordinary language” in the Wittgensteinian tradition as concerned, not with sentences, but with propositions (as this notion is roughly understood in the historically foundational work of the analytic tradition), and if we eschew the suggestion that Wittgenstein has a “theory of meaning”, and regard him, instead, as understanding meaning in a non-reductive way, the result would be a meta-philosophical frameworK that allows us to see this tradition as continuous (at a meta-philosophical level) with certain Socratic and Aristotelian paradigms of inquiry in ancient philosophy. Once this linK is established, the Wittgensteinian tradition can then be seen, implicitly, to contain the foundations for a neo-Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian-analytic ontology. I, explicitly, define and develop this ontology. Some of the conclusions, which emerge from this neo-Aristotelian- Wittgensteinian ontological frameworK, are as follows: (i) There is a fundamental distinction between the human world and the natural world. (ii) The human being, and his irreducible powers of reason and action, belong to the human world, whereas the physiology of the human being belongs to the natural world. (iii) The natural world (which includes the sui generis animal, merely biological and merely physical domains, respectively) is not unified by any positive characteristic, but is bound together only by its privative-contrast with the human world: thus, the natural world cannot be defined as the “realm of law”. (iv) Both Cartesian dualism and post-Cartesian materialistic-naturalism, despite their ontical disagreements, ii ascribe to one and the same understanding of the of organization and character of the basic categorial domains of reality. (v) So-called “philosophical problems” concerning something’s “place in” the “natural world”, e.g., the problem of “free-will” or problem of “consciousness” or the problem of “life”, are by-passed and overcome, but not by showing that these problems arise from confusions concerning “uses of words”, but by showing that these problems, together with their characteristic “solutions”, are themselves a function of this false ontology. Once this ontology is replaced with a “neo-Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian” one, such problems do not arise. Committee Members: Professor Michael Williams, Professor Meredith Williams, Professor Richard Bett, Professor Leonardo Lisi, Professor Paola Marrati iii Preface and Acknowledgements The Wittgensteinian tradition has succeeded in working out a relatively clear understanding of what a Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind and what a Wittgensteinian epistemology would be. What this tradition lacKs is a clearly defined understanding of what a Wittgensteinian ontology would be, i.e., an ontology that would reflect the thought of the later Wittgenstein. In this dissertation, I aim to initiate measures to address that gap in our understanding. With the addition of a Wittgensteinian ontology, our understanding of the philosophy of mind and epistemology would only become more coherent and systematically unified. Moreover, an understanding of all three is needed, I think, for understanding Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy in the right light. Is the fact that we do not currently possess a Wittgensteinian ontology a sign that traditional ontology is somehow foreign to the very character of Wittgenstein’s thought, such that the idea of such a thing would be a contradiction? Or, is it rather due to our not having clearly perceived the route by which we should go about bringing it to light? I suggest the latter explanation. Wittgenstein’s work represents the greatest philosophical achievement of the 20th century, and we need an ontology that reflects this achievement. With the articulation of such an ontology, we will also attain a clearer understanding of the relation between Wittgenstein’s work and the philosophical tradition: Wittgenstein does not maKe a radical breaK with the “philosophical tradition”, understood in some static manner: rather, Wittgenstein’s iv work deepens and enriches our understanding of some of the philosophical tradition’s most traditional and historically original elements. There are numerous people who have helped me throughout this long philosophical journey. I want to thanK my friends, my colleagues, and my students for countless conversations regarding many of the themes that appear in this dissertation. I am grateful to Richard Bett for his feedbacK during the later stages of this project, and, most of all, for introducing me to Aristotle, without whom, I would not Know my way about, philosophically speaKing. I want to thanK Leonardo Lisi for conversations regarding Kierkegaard and his place in the history of philosophy. Sean Greenberg helped to bring my attention to the importance of the history of philosophy for our understanding of contemporary philosophical problems. I’m grateful to EcKart Förster for introducing me to Heidegger: reading Heidegger helped me to thinK about what it might mean to frame Wittgenstein’s later worK as a contribution to ontology. I want to thanK Maura Tumulty for numerous discussions regarding the work of Wittgenstein. I gained invaluable philosophical instruction at the University of Chicago, where I studied with James Conant, Jonathan Lear, Michael Forster, Robert Pippin, the late Leonard Linsky, the late Ted Cohen, the late John Haugeland, along with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam during their visiting appointments. It was a privilege to be a part of the “Graduate Workshop on Wittgenstein” for the last two years I was an undergraduate; and also to participate in Leonard Linsky’s extra- v curricular reading group on On Certainty and Philosophical Investigations. During many of these meetings, it was often only the two of us. Both James Conant and Jonathan Lear have continued to provide me with feedbacK on my worK. Jonathan Lear read and provided comments on an earlier version of Chapter 4. Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Meredith Williams and Michael Williams for their instruction, feedback and support over the years. Meredith Williams’s and Michael Williams’s philosophical worK allowed me to see that the substance of Wittgenstein’s thought went beyond “therapeutic diagnosis”, and primarily involved what is called “theoretical diagnosis”. Furthermore, both Meredith Williams and Michael Williams provided, in different areas of philosophy, theoretical diagnoses of classic philosophical problems in contemporary philosophical terms. This example led me to explore how Wittgenstein’s thought might implicitly contain a philosophical paradigm that could and should become standard in contemporary philosophy. Without the models of their worK to guide and inspire me, this dissertation would have never been possible; it was by engaging with their worK that I first began to understand what it means to articulate the achievements of Wittgenstein in a traditional form and then to do philosophy in a way that reflects these achievements. vi Table of Contents Abstract, ii Preface and AcKnowledgements, iv List of Figures, viii Introduction, p. 1 Chapter 1: Foundations, p. 21 Chapter 2: Neo-Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian Ontology, p. 190 Chapter 3: Four Contemporary Philosophers, p. 289 Chapter 4: The Socratic-Aristotelian Tradition, p. 317 Bibliography, p. 372 Biography, p. 383 vii List of Figures: Figure 1: p. 31 Figure 2: 191 Figure 3: 192 Figure 4: 193 Figure 5: 194 Figure 6: p. 342 Figure 7: p. 343 Figure 8: p. 345 viii The consequences---for metaphysics…of a decision on the question whether the categoremata are charged or uncharged, are widely ramified and virtually uninvestigated. (Fred Sommers) In an important sense, he [Wittgenstein] unwittingly revived (breathed fresh life into) the Aristotelian tradition. (P. M. S. HacKer) In order to Know an object, I must Know not its external but all its internal qualities. (Ludwig Wittgenstein) ix Introduction In the original conception of analytic philosophy, circa 1900, the proposition was given a central role both ontologically and meta-philosophically. Philosophy itself was understood as the analysis of elements of propositions as elements of propositions, in light of an understanding of the basic forms, notions and structures that govern those elements. However, Russell regarded the proposition as having a Fregean logical form, and the understanding of the character of human Knowledge was, in this historical period, in no small part, influenced by early modern/modern conceptions of the mind and by models of progress afforded by mathematics, logic and the natural sciences. In Chapter 1, “Foundations”, I argue that if we critically consider some of the best work in the Wittgensteinian tradition over the last 60 years, what we shall see is that, taKen together, this tradition would have little reason to object to the understanding of the proposition and of analysis in the founding work of the analytic tradition. For, philosophy is, in fact, well characterized in an early-analytic manner as the analysis of elements of propositions as elements of propositions, in light of an understanding of the basic
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Aristotle's Assertoric Syllogistic and Modern Relevance Logic*
    Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic and modern relevance logic* Abstract: This paper sets out to evaluate the claim that Aristotle’s Assertoric Syllogistic is a relevance logic or shows significant similarities with it. I prepare the grounds for a meaningful comparison by extracting the notion of relevance employed in the most influential work on modern relevance logic, Anderson and Belnap’s Entailment. This notion is characterized by two conditions imposed on the concept of validity: first, that some meaning content is shared between the premises and the conclusion, and second, that the premises of a proof are actually used to derive the conclusion. Turning to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, I argue that there is evidence that Aristotle’s Assertoric Syllogistic satisfies both conditions. Moreover, Aristotle at one point explicitly addresses the potential harmfulness of syllogisms with unused premises. Here, I argue that Aristotle’s analysis allows for a rejection of such syllogisms on formal grounds established in the foregoing parts of the Prior Analytics. In a final section I consider the view that Aristotle distinguished between validity on the one hand and syllogistic validity on the other. Following this line of reasoning, Aristotle’s logic might not be a relevance logic, since relevance is part of syllogistic validity and not, as modern relevance logic demands, of general validity. I argue that the reasons to reject this view are more compelling than the reasons to accept it and that we can, cautiously, uphold the result that Aristotle’s logic is a relevance logic. Keywords: Aristotle, Syllogism, Relevance Logic, History of Logic, Logic, Relevance 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein's
    ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein’s Methodology Dorit Lemberger Bar-Ilan university Abstract The dialogical character of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has received scant attention in the literature, given the work’s status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations. The main lines of interpretation that have been proposed see dialogue as a rhetorical technique intended to present erroneous positions and then refute them, as an exemplification of what can be expressed in language (McGinn 1997; Rhees 1998), or as a reflection of Wittgenstein’s informal teaching method (Malcolm 2001; Savickey et al. 1990). The present article adopts the perspective that Wittgenstein’s use of dialogue makes it possible to track the various modes of language-acts, consonant with his directions to examine the daily use of language (Wittgenstein 2009, §116 and esp. §132), “when language is, as it were, idling.” In his later inquiries, Wittgenstein frequently considers the nature of mental states, accompanied by an attempt to characterize the differences between them while at the same time dealing with the cases in which it is difficult to distinguish them. In this process he made a variety of uses of dialogue, each of which embodies a different aspect of language action. Subsequently I will demonstrate that these different uses are not haphazard. A scrutiny of the nature of the dialogue can help us understand the nature of the activity carried out of the state of consciousness. Finally, I propose a distinction among three main types of dialogue: technical, conversational, and reflexive.
    [Show full text]
  • Wittgenstein on Freedom of the Will: Not Determinism, Yet Not Indeterminism
    Wittgenstein on Freedom of the Will: Not Determinism, Yet Not Indeterminism Thomas Nadelhoffer This is a prepublication draft. This version is being revised for resubmission to a journal. Abstract Since the publication of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Freedom of the Will, his remarks about free will and determinism have received very little attention. Insofar as these lectures give us an opportunity to see him at work on a traditional—and seemingly intractable—philosophical problem and given the voluminous secondary literature written about nearly every other facet of Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy, this neglect is both surprising and unfortunate. Perhaps these lectures have not attracted much attention because they are available to us only in the form of a single student’s notes (Yorick Smythies). Or perhaps it is because, as one Wittgenstein scholar put it, the lectures represent only “cursory reflections” that “are themselves uncompelling." (Glock 1996: 390) Either way, my goal is to show that Wittgenstein’s views about freedom of the will merit closer attention. All of these arguments might look as if I wanted to argue for the freedom of the will or against it. But I don't want to. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Freedom of the Will Since the publication of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Freedom of the Will,1 his remarks from these lectures about free will and determinism have received very little attention.2 Insofar as these lectures give us an opportunity to see him at work on a traditional—and seemingly intractable— philosophical problem and given the voluminous secondary literature written about nearly every 1 Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Freedom of the Will” will be abbreviated as LFW 1993 in this paper (see bibliography) since I am using the version reprinted in Philosophical Occasions (1993).
    [Show full text]
  • Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.Pdf
    PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS By LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Translated by G. E. M. ANSCOMBE BASIL BLACKWELL TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Copyright © Basil Blackwell Ltd 1958 MY acknowledgments are due to the following, who either checked First published 1953 Second edition 1958 the translation or allowed me to consult them about German and Reprint of English text alone 1963 Austrian usage or read the translation through and helped me to Third edition of English and German text with index 1967 improve the English: Mr. R. Rhees, Professor G. H. von Wright, Reprint of English text with index 1968, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, Mr. P. Geach, Mr. G. Kreisel, Miss L. Labowsky, Mr. D. Paul, Miss I. 1981, 1986 Murdoch. Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be NOTE TO SECOND EDITION reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or THE text has been revised for the new edition. A large number of otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. small changes have been made in the English text. The following passages have been significantly altered: Except in the United States of America, this book is sold to the In Part I: §§ 108, 109, 116, 189, 193, 251, 284, 352, 360, 393,418, condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re- 426, 442, 456, 493, 520, 556, 582, 591, 644, 690, 692.
    [Show full text]
  • Wittgenstein's True Thoughts
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 2(2013) AndrewLugg Wittgenstein’sTrue Thoughts Abstract The centralremarks of the Tractatus are without substantial content or consequence, remarks at theboundaries of sense that dissolveinto truth.While theysay nothing,theyencapsulatelogicalfeatures of languageand theworld.Unasserted, they expressthoughts, thetruth of which Wittgensteintakestobeunassailableand definitive, while asserted,they are out-and-out nonsense.Whatismanifest in linguistic practice is no more sayable – andnolesssignificant – thanwhatis manifest in logical truths,mathematicalequationsand theprinciplesof mechanics. 1. Understandingthe Tractatus Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to espouse philosophical opinions and defend adistinctive philosophicalpoint of viewinthe Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP 1955/1961) 1 .There is no shaking the impression thatheisfully engaged in thephilosophicalenterprise, and it doeshim adisservice to interpret himasdismissing philosophy root and branch. Besides criticising traditional philosophy and pioneering anew approach to philosophical problems, he promotes what looksfor allthe world like philosophicalideas. This is how the Tractatus was read at the time by Bertrand Russell, Frank Ramsey andthe members of the Vienna 1 References to Wittgenstein’s works will be given using the abbreviations mentioned in the list of references. 33 Andrew Lugg BY-NC-SA Circle,not least Rudolf Carnapand Moritz Schlick,and how it is stillwidely read. It cannot be by chancethat Wittgenstein refers to “the thoughts whichare expressedin[the
    [Show full text]
  • Title Spons Agency Bureau No Pub Date Contract Note
    DOCUMENT LIZSUME ED 071' C87 82 015 524 TITLE Project Musics Reader 2,Motion in the Heavens. .INSTITUTION Harvard Univ., Cambridge,Mass. Harvard Project _Physics. SPONS AGENCY Office of Education (DREW), Washington, D.C.,Bureau of Research. BUREAU NO BK-5-1038 PUB DATE 68 CONTRACT 08C-5-10-058 NOTE 233p.; Authorized InterimVersion EDRS PRICE MF -$0.65 HC-89.87 _DESCRIPTORS Astronomy; Instructional Materials;.*Motion; *Physics; Science, Fiction;. Science Materials; _Secondary Grades; *Secondary School Science; *Space; *Supplementary Reading Materials IDENTIFIER'S Harvard Project Physics ABSTRACT As a supplement to.Projpct Physics Unit 2, specially, selected articles are presented in this reader for student browsing. _Eight excerpts are given under headings:,the starry messenger, Newton_. And the principia, an appreciation of the earth, space the unconquerable, Is there intelligent life beyond the earth3,11 the life story of a galaxy, expansion of the universe, and Dyson sphere. Seven book passages. are included under. the, headings of the black cloud, roll call, a night at the observatory, Repler's celestial music, universal gravitation, a table of stars within twenty-two light years that could have habitable planets, and three poetic _fragments about astronomy. The remaining articles includea preface to the books of the ,revolutions, Kepler, Kepler on. Mars, laws of ..motion and proposition one,, garden of Epicurus, a search for life on earth at Kilometer resolution, the. boy who redeemed his father's _name, great comet of 1965, gravity experiments, unidentified flying objects, and negative mass. Illustrations for explanationpurposes . are provided. The work of Harvard. Project Physics has been .financially supported by: the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford.
    [Show full text]
  • Putnam and Diamond on Religious Belief and the “Gulfs Between Us” Sofia Miguens*
    The Monist, 2020, 103, 404–414 doi: 10.1093/monist/onaa013 Article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/103/4/404/5905779 by University of Chicago user on 03 November 2020 The Human Face of Naturalism: Putnam and Diamond on Religious Belief and the “Gulfs between Us” Sofia Miguens* ABSTRACT Hilary Putnam and Cora Diamond both wrote on Wittgenstein’s Three Lectures on Religious Belief. They did it quite differently; my ultimate aim in this article is to explore this difference. Putnam’s view of religion is largely a view of ethical life; I look thus into his writings on ethics and his proposals to face the relativist menace therein. Still, in his incursions into philosophy of religion, describing religious experience through authors such as Rosenzweig, Buber, or Levinas, Putnam deals with what Diamond calls, after Wittgenstein, “the gulfs between us.” Such gulfs, and the threat of relativism they bring, need to be accounted for. With that purpose in mind I complement Putnam’s reading of the Three Lectures with Diamond’s own reading. Those who know my writings from that period [the early 1950s] may wonder how I reconciled my religious streak, which existed to some extent even back then, and my general scientific materialist worldview at that time. The answer is that I didn’t recon- cile them. I was a thoroughgoing atheist, and I was a believer. I simply kept these two parts of myself separate. —Hilary Putnam (1992,1) 1. RELIGION AS ETHICS AND THE NATURE OF PUTNAM’S WRITINGS ON RELIGION How does religion, broadly conceived, sit with Putnam’s philosophy? In what follows I try to answer this question.
    [Show full text]
  • Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Aristotle And
    MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2012 PREPRINT 422 TOPOI – Towards a Historical Epistemology of Space Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Irina Tupikova Aristotle and Ptolemy on Geocentrism: Diverging Argumentative Strategies and Epistemologies TOPOI – TOWARDS A HISTORICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF SPACE The TOPOI project cluster of excellence brings together researchers who investigate the formation and transformation of space and knowledge in ancient civilizations and their later developments. The present preprint series presents the work of members and fellows of the research group Historical Epistemology of Space which is part of the TOPOI cluster. The group is based on a cooperation between the Humboldt University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and commenced work in September 2008. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Aristotle 5 2.1 Aristotle’s confrontation with the cosmologies of his prede- cessors . 6 2.2 Aristotle’s presentation of his own views . 9 3 Ptolemy 15 3.1 The heavens move like a sphere . 16 3.2 The Earth, taken as a whole, is sensibly spherical . 24 3.3 The Earth is in the middle of the heavens . 24 3.4 The Earth has the ratio of a point to the heavens . 32 3.5 The Earth does not have any motion from place to place . 33 4 Conclusions and perspectives 37 Chapter 1 Introduction This paper aims at a comparison of the different argumentative strategies employed by Aristotle and Ptolemy in their approaches to geocentrism through an analysis of their discussion of the centrality of the Earth in De caelo II, 13-14 and Almagest, I, 3-7.
    [Show full text]
  • Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Beholding Categories
    Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2013 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2013 Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Beholding Categories Samuel Jonathan Shapiro Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Recommended Citation Shapiro, Samuel Jonathan, "Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Beholding Categories" (2013). Senior Projects Spring 2013. 13. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2013/13 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Beholding Categories Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Sam Shapiro Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2013 In memory of Karolina Mroz 1991-2013 Table of Contents Preface Page 1 Chapter One: Aristotle's Categories I. The Pre-Predicamenta Page 10 II. Substance Page 20 Chapter Two: Classifying Nature I. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nature Page 43 II. Michael Thompson: A Critique of Empiricism Page 60 Chapter Three: Ludwig Wittgenstein Inheriting Aristotle I. Words as Categories Page 69 II. Family Resemblances and Ramsey’s Maxim Page 81 III.
    [Show full text]
  • The Peripatetic Program in Categorical Logic: Leibniz on Propositional Terms
    THE REVIEW OF SYMBOLIC LOGIC, Page 1 of 65 THE PERIPATETIC PROGRAM IN CATEGORICAL LOGIC: LEIBNIZ ON PROPOSITIONAL TERMS MARKO MALINK Department of Philosophy, New York University and ANUBAV VASUDEVAN Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago Abstract. Greek antiquity saw the development of two distinct systems of logic: Aristotle’s theory of the categorical syllogism and the Stoic theory of the hypothetical syllogism. Some ancient logicians argued that hypothetical syllogistic is more fundamental than categorical syllogistic on the grounds that the latter relies on modes of propositional reasoning such as reductio ad absurdum. Peripatetic logicians, by contrast, sought to establish the priority of categorical over hypothetical syllogistic by reducing various modes of propositional reasoning to categorical form. In the 17th century, this Peripatetic program of reducing hypothetical to categorical logic was championed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In an essay titled Specimina calculi rationalis, Leibniz develops a theory of propositional terms that allows him to derive the rule of reductio ad absurdum in a purely categor- ical calculus in which every proposition is of the form AisB. We reconstruct Leibniz’s categorical calculus and show that it is strong enough to establish not only the rule of reductio ad absurdum,but all the laws of classical propositional logic. Moreover, we show that the propositional logic generated by the nonmonotonic variant of Leibniz’s categorical calculus is a natural system of relevance logic ¬ known as RMI→ . From its beginnings in antiquity up until the late 19th century, the study of formal logic was shaped by two distinct approaches to the subject. The first approach was primarily concerned with simple propositions expressing predicative relations between terms.
    [Show full text]
  • Logic: a Brief Introduction Ronald L
    Logic: A Brief Introduction Ronald L. Hall, Stetson University Chapter 1 - Basic Training 1.1 Introduction In this logic course, we are going to be relying on some “mental muscles” that may need some toning up. But don‟t worry, we recognize that it may take some time to get these muscles strengthened; so we are going to take it slow before we get up and start running. Are you ready? Well, let‟s begin our basic training with some preliminary conceptual stretching. Certainly all of us recognize that activities like riding a bicycle, balancing a checkbook, or playing chess are acquired skills. Further, we know that in order to acquire these skills, training and study are important, but practice is essential. It is also commonplace to acknowledge that these acquired skills can be exercised at various levels of mastery. Those who have studied the piano and who have practiced diligently certainly are able to play better than those of us who have not. The plain fact is that some people play the piano better than others. And the same is true of riding a bicycle, playing chess, and so forth. Now let‟s stretch this agreement about such skills a little further. Consider the activity of thinking. Obviously, we all think, but it is seldom that we think about thinking. So let's try to stretch our thinking to include thinking about thinking. As we do, and if this does not cause too much of a cramp, we will see that thinking is indeed an activity that has much in common with other acquired skills.
    [Show full text]
  • Aristotle on Predication
    DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12054 Aristotle on Predication Phil Corkum Abstract: A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Sub- jects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates char- acterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In this paper, I will examine evidence for ascribing to Aristotle the view that subjects and predicates refer. If this is correct, then it seems that Aristotle, like the traditional term logician, problematically conflates predication and identity claims. I will argue that we can ascribe to Aristotle the view that both subjects and predicates refer, while holding that he would deny that a sentence is true just in case the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In particular, I will argue that Aristotle’s core semantic notion is not identity but the weaker relation of consti- tution. For example, the predication ‘All men are mortal’ expresses a true thought, in Aristotle’s view, just in case the mereological sum of humans is a part of the mereological sum of mortals. A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homo- geneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing.
    [Show full text]