Book Review: III.—Theology, Philosophy and Apologetics: An Introduction to Philosophy

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

logical possibility, be two things which had exactly the same predicates, in the narrow sense in which we have been using the word “predicate.” How does our axiom look when we pass beyond predicates in this narrow sense? In the actual world there seems no way of doubting its empirical truth as regards particulars, owing to spatio-temporal differentiation: no two particulars have exactly the sam...

Introduction to Philosophy

There are many different kinds of philosophy. For example, there is Indian philosophy (which has its roots in the ancient body of oral tradition known as the Veda), Islamic philosophy, Japanese philosophy and Chinese philosophy. However, none of these have had any real influence on the scientific tradition in which cognitive science has grown up. That scientific tradition is Western science and...

Philosophy of Science : An Introduction

Book Reviews Language and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

MIT Press has given us two new introductory philosophy-of-language books, both of which fall within the category of "single-author" texts (despite the multiple authorship of one of them); that is, they are not anthologies, but presentations of the material from the perspective of the author(s). Why would a publisher issue two such texts in the same year, running the risk of having each undercut...

Book Review: Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to the World of Proofs and Pictures, Volume 47, Number 10

This example indicates that there is more than one way to look at the role of pictures in proof. The weakest claim is that a picture can serve as an aid to inspire a proof. The mathematician presenting the Bolzano proof could agree to this. A stronger position is that a picture may be taken to be an element of a formal proof. If one can specify syntactic rules for words that constitute a proof,...