This vivid and thought-provoking book by the Israeli logician Nimrod Bar-Am impels one to rethink the place of logic in Western thought. It shows that the history of logic from Aristotle to Tarski is the history of the gradual undoing of the classic conflation of logic and empirical science. It sets tomorrow’s agenda for philosophers and historians of logic and scientific method by taking as its starting point the mere fact that, curiously, ancient logic is not as formal as current literature presents it. Rather, as Bar-Am explains, modern formal logic became possible only after a series of bold criticisms of the magnificent Aristotelian system. These criticisms begin with David Hume’s declaration that logic does not sanction induction, follow on with Kant’s view of logic as an extremely limited system, and culminating with Booles’ introduction of logic as an extensional system, and Russell’s solution to his own paradox. The book offers a breathtaking intellectual odyssey; presenting the development of logic as an evolving critical assessment of approaches to an impossible ideal. Bar-Am handles an extremely complex subject matter in a manner that is both accessible to the general educated reader and challenging to the learned expert, by opening to them live background ideas to dead formulas. The book will easily find its place alongside both general introductions to the history of science and advanced reading lists in the philosophy of logic.
Author(s): Nimrod Bar- Am
Edition: 1
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 172
1402081677......Page 1
Contents......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Abstract......Page 8
Introduction: In Praise of Shallowness: A Methodological Credo......Page 13
Part I: Preliminary Notes......Page 18
I. Controversies as Contests: The Birth of Intellectual Responsibility......Page 19
II. Methodology is not Epistemology......Page 21
III. Conflation is not Confusion......Page 22
IV. Proof is not Sound Inference......Page 26
Part II: Setting the Scene: Some Notes on the Pre-history of Logic......Page 30
1. The Mother of All Conflations: Parmenides' Proof......Page 31
2. Early Disagreements Concerning the Power of Proofs: The Uses and Misuses of Dialogues......Page 37
3. The Sophists' Challenge......Page 44
Part III: Aristotle's Logic: The Rise of Essentialism......Page 50
4. The Beginning is the Term......Page 51
5. Chimera in the Dusk: Essentialism......Page 60
6. Semantics is not Ontology......Page 72
7. The Mother of All Matrices, or, How Terms Spawn Definitions and Syllogisms......Page 76
8. The Conflation of the Source with the True, Good and Beautiful (Source)......Page 81
9. Induction as Spell-Casting......Page 86
10. The Birth of Induction from Sea Foam......Page 91
11. Taxonomy of Reality by Syllogism......Page 99
Part IV: Essentialism Besieged......Page 103
12. Ad Hominem Logic: Logic between Aristotle and Boole......Page 104
13. The Neglect of Judgment......Page 110
14. Leibniz as Aristotle and Boole Conflated......Page 116
15. Why Transcendental Logic is no Logic at All......Page 122
Part V: The Fall of Essentialism......Page 128
16. Extensionalism as Exorcism......Page 129
17. Mathematical Logic: An Oxymoron......Page 134
18. The Last Step......Page 141
Epilogue: Extensionalism in a New Context......Page 147
Notes......Page 149
Bibliography......Page 162
G......Page 167
R......Page 168
Z......Page 169
E......Page 170
S......Page 171
V......Page 172
