Formal Epistemology – the Future Synthesis

Logic as a philosophical discipline originated in ancient Greece, at about the same time as mathematics was constituted as a deductive science. From ancient times two logical systems have survived – the Aristotelian syllogistic logic and the Stoic propositional logic. It took almost two thousand years, until in the works of Boole, Frege and Peano logic was turned into a formal discipline. The resulting synthesis, which was created by Whitehead and Russell, has brought a remarkable unification of the ideas of these authors. It seems that epistemology is recently undergoing formalization similar to the one occurring in logic in the 19th century.