Download or read book Kripke s Worlds written by Olivier Gasquet and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possible worlds models were introduced by Saul Kripke in the early 1960s. Basically, a possible world's model is nothing but a graph with labelled nodes and labelled edges. Such graphs provide semantics for various modal logics (alethic, temporal, epistemic and doxastic, dynamic, deontic, description logics) and also turned out useful for other nonclassical logics (intuitionistic, conditional, several paraconsistent and relevant logics). All these logics have been studied intensively in philosophical and mathematical logic and in computer science, and have been applied increasingly in domains such as program semantics, artificial intelligence, and more recently in the semantic web. Additionally, all these logics were also studied proof theoretically. The proof systems for modal logics come in various styles: Hilbert style, natural deduction, sequents, and resolution. However, it is fair to say that the most uniform and most successful such systems are tableaux systems. Given logic and a formula, they allow one to check whether there is a model in that logic. This basically amounts to trying to build a model for the formula by building a tree. This book follows a more general approach by trying to build a graph, the advantage being that a graph is closer to a Kripke model than a tree. It provides a step-by-step introduction to possible worlds semantics (and by that to modal and other nonclassical logics) via the tableaux method. It is accompanied by a piece of software called LoTREC (www.irit.fr/Lotrec). LoTREC allows to check whether a given formula is true at a given world of a given model and to check whether a given formula is satisfiable in a given logic. The latter can be done immediately if the tableau system for that logic has already been implemented in LoTREC. If this is not yet the case LoTREC offers the possibility to implement a tableau system in a relatively easy way via a simple, graph-based, interactive language.
Download or read book Naming and Necessity written by Saul A. Kripke and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it. Ever since the publication of its original version, Naming and Necessity has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.
Download or read book Reference and Existence written by Saul A. Kripke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work can be read as a sequel to Kripke's classic Naming and Necessity, confronting important issues left open in that work and developing a novel approach to questions concerning empty names and existence. It provides along the way novel treatments of fictional and mythological discourse, the pragmatics of definite and indefinite descriptions and the language of sense data.
Download or read book Saul Kripke written by G. W. Fitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Kripke is one of the most original and creative philosophers writing today. His work has had a tremendous impact on the direction that philosophy has taken in the last thirty years and continues to dominate some of its most fundamental aspects. Given Kripke's importance it is perhaps surprising that there is no introduction to his philosophy available to the general student. This book fills that gap. As much of Kripke's work is highly technical, the book's central aim is to provide clear exposition of Kripke's ideas in a form that is understandable to a beginning readership as well as a commentary on them that more advanced students will find useful. The book begins with a discussion of Kripke's early work on modal logic, which provides the foundation for many of his later philosophical contributions, before examining in detail Kripke's central ideas and arguments contained in Naming and Necessity. In further chapters, Kripke's work on semantic paradoxes and his theory of truth are outlined as well as his controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein's famous private language argument. Kripke's ideas are situated alongside those of his precursors and some of the most important and interesting responses to them are explored. The reader is thus able to appreciate the path-breaking nature of Kripke's contributions, how they have challenged fundamentally traditional interpretations, and how they have sparked some of the most important philosophical debates of recent years.
Download or read book Reference and Description written by Scott Soames and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Scott Soames defends the revolution in philosophy led by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan against attack from those wishing to revive descriptivism in the philosophy of language, internalism in the philosophy of mind, and conceptualism in the foundations of modality. Soames explains how, in the last twenty-five years, this attack on the anti-descriptivist revolution has coalesced around a technical development called two-dimensional modal logic that seeks to reinterpret the Kripkean categories of the necessary aposteriori and the contingent apriori in ways that drain them of their far-reaching philosophical significance. Arguing against this reinterpretation, Soames shows how the descriptivist revival has been aided by puzzles and problems ushered in by the anti-descriptivist revolution, as well as by certain errors and missteps in the anti-descriptivist classics themselves. Reference and Description sorts through all this, assesses and consolidates the genuine legacy of Kripke and Kaplan, and launches a thorough and devastating critique of the two-dimensionalist revival of descriptivism. Through it all, Soames attempts to provide the outlines of a lasting, nondescriptivist perspective on meaning, and a nonconceptualist understanding of modality.
Download or read book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language written by Saul A. Kripke and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of Contents " Preface " Introductory " The Wittgensteinian Paradox " The Solution and the 'Private Language' Argument " Postscript Wittgenstein and Other Minds " Index.
Download or read book Kripke Names Necessity and Identity written by Christopher Hughes and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.
Download or read book Saul Kripke written by Alan Berger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays on Saul Kripke and his philosophy is the first and only collection of essays to examine both published and unpublished writings by Kripke. Its essays, written by distinguished philosophers in the field, present a broader picture of Kripke's life and work than has previously been available to scholars of his thought. New topics covered in these essays include vacuous names and names in fiction, Kripke on logicism and de re attitude toward numbers, Kripke on the incoherency of adopting a logic, Kripke on colour words and his criticism of the primary versus secondary quality distinction, and Kripke's critique of functionalism. These essays not only present Kripke's basic arguments but also engage with the arguments and controversies engendered by his work, providing the most comprehensive analysis of his philosophy and writings available. This collection will become a classic in contemporary analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence written by International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 1985 with total page 1368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no one has done more in the last 30 years to advance thinking in the metaphysics of modality than has Alvin Plantinga. Collected here are some of his most important essays on this influential subject. Dating back from the late 1960's to the present, they chronicle the development of Plantinga's thoughts about some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics: what is the nature of abstract objects like possible worlds, properties, propositions, and such phenomena? Are there possible but non-actual objects? Can objects that do not exist exemplify properties? Plantinga gives thorough and penetrating answers to all of these questions and many others. This volume contains some of the best work in metaphysics from the past 30 years, and will remain a source of critical contention and keen interest among philosophers of metaphysics and philosophical logic for years to come.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Science and Aim Oriented Empiricism written by Nicholas Maxwell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-09 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives an account of work that I have done over a period of decades that sets out to solve two fundamental problems of philosophy: the mind-body problem and the problem of induction. Remarkably, these revolutionary contributions to philosophy turn out to have dramatic implications for a wide range of issues outside philosophy itself, most notably for the capacity of humanity to resolve current grave global problems and make progress towards a better, wiser world. A key element of the proposed solution to the first problem is that physics is about only a highly specialized aspect of all that there is – the causally efficacious aspect. Once this is understood, it ceases to be a mystery that natural science says nothing about the experiential aspect of reality, the colours we perceive, the inner experiences we are aware of. That natural science is silent about the experiential aspect of reality is no reason whatsoever to hold that the experiential does not objectively exist. A key element of the proposed solution to the second problem is that physics, in persistently accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical assumption about the universe: it is such that a unified pattern of physical law runs through all phenomena. We need a new conception, and kind, of physics that acknowledges, and actively seeks to improve, metaphysical presuppositions inherent in the methods of physics. The problematic aims and methods of physics need to be improved as physics proceeds. These are the ideas that have fruitful implications, I set out to show, for a wide range of issues: for philosophy itself, for physics, for natural science more generally, for the social sciences, for education, for the academic enterprise as a whole and, most important of all, for the capacity of humanity to learn how to solve the grave global problems that menace our future, and thus make progress to a better, wiser world. It is not just science that has problematic aims; in life too our aims, whether personal, social or institutional, are all too often profoundly problematic, and in urgent need of improvement. We need a new kind of academic enterprise which helps humanity put aims-and-methods improving meta-methods into practice in personal and social life, so that we may come to do better at achieving what is of value in life, and make progress towards a saner, wiser world. This body of work of mine has met with critical acclaim. Despite that, astonishingly, it has been ignored by mainstream philosophy. In the book I discuss the recent work of over 100 philosophers on the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of science, and show that my earlier, highly relevant work on these issues is universally ignored, the quality of subsequent work suffering as a result. My hope, in publishing this book, is that my fellow philosophers will come to appreciate the intellectual value of my proposed solutions to the mind-body problem and the problem of induction, and will, as a result, join with me in attempting to convince our fellow academics that we need to bring about an intellectual/institutional revolution in academic inquiry so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to solve problems of living, including global problems, and make progress towards as good, as wise and enlightened a world as possible.
Download or read book Worlds and Individuals Possible and Otherwise written by Takashi Yagisawa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takashi Yagisawa argues for a new version of modal realism, the view that non-actual possible worlds and individuals are as real as the actual ones. He asserts that the notion of reality is primitive, existence is a relation between a thing and a domain, and ordinary objects are extended in spatial, temporal, and modal dimensions.
Download or read book Identity and Individuation written by Milton K. Munitz and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Theory of Reference written by P. Humphreys and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970 Saul Kripke delivered three lectures at Princeton University. They produced something of a sensation. In the lectures he argued, amongst other things, that many names in ordinary language referred to objects directly rather than by means of associated descriptions; that causal chains from language user to language user were an important mechanism for preserving reference; that there were necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori truths; that identity relations between rigid designators were necessary; and argued, more tentatively, that materialist identity theories in the philosophy of mind were suspect. Interspersed with this was a consider able amount of material on natural kind terms and essentialism. As a result of these lectures and a related 1971 paper, 'Identity and Necessity' (Kripke [1971]), talk of rigid designators, Hesperus and Phosphorus, meter bars, gold and H 0, and suchlike quickly became commonplace in philosophical circles 2 and when the lectures were published under the title Naming and Necessity in the collection The Semantics of Natural Language (Davidson and Harman l [1972]), that volume became the biggest seller in the Reidel (later Kluwer) list. The cluster of theses surrounding the idea that a relation of direct reference 2 exists between names and their referents is now frequently referred to as 'The 3 New Theory of Reference'.
Download or read book The Ashtray written by Errol Morris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-02-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filmmaker Errol Morris offers his perspective on the world and his powerful belief in the necessity of truth. In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result. At the time, Morris was a graduate student. Now we know him as one of the most celebrated and restlessly probing filmmakers of our time, the creator of such classics of documentary investigation as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. Kuhn, meanwhile, was—and, posthumously, remains—a star in his field, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a landmark book that has sold well over a million copies and introduced the concept of “paradigm shifts” to the larger culture. And Morris thought the idea was bunk. The Ashtray tells why—and in doing so, it makes a powerful case for Morris’s way of viewing the world, and the centrality to that view of a fundamental conception of the necessity of truth. “For me,” Morris writes, “truth is about the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence idea of truth.” He has no patience for philosophical systems that aim for internal coherence and disdain the world itself. Morris is after bigger game: he wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions. Rather, Morris argues powerfully, it is our duty to do everything we can to establish and support it. In a time when truth feels ever more embattled, under siege from political lies and virtual lives alike, The Ashtray is a bracing reminder of its value, delivered by a figure who has, over decades, uniquely earned our trust through his commitment to truth. No Morris fan should miss it.
Download or read book A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics written by James M. Russell and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big ideas sometimes come from the strangest places. In this wide ranging introduction, James M Russell takes the fear out of philosophy and selects seventy-six works - from Plato, Descartes and Wittgenstein to Philip K Dick and the Moomins as well as contemporary thinkers such as Peter Singer and John Rawls. Dividing into accessible sections - history, contemplation, happiness, and -isms, Russell gives us the lives as well as the lessons of the great thinkers, including a digest of their key ideas. A perfect antidote to the complex life. The topics and books covered include: Traditional Philosophy: The Republic, Plato; The Confessions, St Augustine; The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes; On Liberty, John Stuart Mill; Philisophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant. Outsiders: Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard; Beyond Good and Evil, Frederick Nietzsche; The Outsider, Albert Camus; Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley. Contemplation as Philosophy: The Prophet, Kahil Gibran; Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig; The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. The Continental Tradition: The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci; The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault; Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard. How to Live Your Life: The Art of War, Sun Tzu; Maxims, La Rouchefoucauld; Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung; On Sexuality, Sigmund Freud; On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers. Political and Personal Issues: Das Kapital, Karl Marx; Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre; Gaia, James Lovelock. Modern Philosophy: A Theory of Justice, John Rawls; Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett; After the Terror, Ted Honderich.
Download or read book Logical Dynamics of Information and Interaction written by Johan van Benthem and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science.
