Best of
Logic

1997

The Riddle of Scheherazade: And Other Amazing Puzzles


Raymond M. Smullyan - 1997
    “The most entertaining logician and set theorist who ever lived” (Martin Gardner) gives us an encore to The Lady or the Tiger?-a fiendishly clever, utterly captivating new collection of 225 brainteasers, puzzles, and paradoxes.

The Complete Lojban Language


John Woldemar Cowan - 1997
    

Mathematical Problem Solving


Alan H. Schoenfeld - 1997
    

The Frege Reader


Gottlob Frege - 1997
    It is intended to provide the essential primary texts for students of logic, metaphysics and philosophy of language.It contains, in particular, Frege's four essays 'Function and Concept', 'On Sinn and Bedeutung', 'On Concept and Object' and 'Thought', and new translations of key parts of the Begriffschrift, Grundlagen and Grundgesetze. Additional selections have also been made from his Collected Papers, Posthumous Writings and Correspondence. The editor's introduction provides an overview of the development and significance of Frege's philosophy, highlighting some of the main issues of interpretation. Footnotes, appendices and other editorial material have been supplied to facilitate understanding of the works of one of the central figures in modern philosophy.

Understanding Mathematics from Counting to Calculus


Keith I. Kressin - 1997
    Imparts intuition and understanding while explaining both the "why" and "how" of math.

Papers in Philosophical Logic


David Kellogg Lewis - 1997
    This first volume is devoted to Lewis' work on philosophical logic from the past twenty-five years. The topics covered include: deploying the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalized languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalized philosophical systems.

From Brouwer to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s


Paolo Mancosu - 1997
    The 1920s witnessed the seminal foundational work of Hilbert and Bernays in proof theory, Brouwer's refinement of intuitionistic mathematics, and Weyl's predicativist approach to the foundations of analysis. This impressive collection makes available the first English translations of twenty-five central articles by these important contributors and many others. The articles have been translated for the first time from Dutch, French, and German, and the volume is divided into four sections devoted to (1) Brouwer, (2) Weyl, (3) Bernays and Hilbert, and (4) the emergence of intuitionistic logic. Each section opens with an introduction which provides the necessary historical and technical context for understanding the articles. Although most contemporary work in this field takes its start from the groundbreaking contributions of these major figures, a good, scholarly introduction to the area was not available until now. Unique and accessible, From Brouwer To Hilbert will serve as an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy of mathematics, and will also be an invaluable resource for philosophers, mathematicians, and interested non-specialists.

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language


Bob Hale - 1997
    As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

A Logical Journey: From Godel to Philosophy


Hao Wang - 1997
    "A Logical Journey" is a continuation of Wang's "Reflections on Godel" and also elaborates on discussions contained in "From Mathematics to Philosophy." A decade in preparation, it contains important and unfamiliar insights into Godel's views on a wide range of issues, from Platonism and the nature of logic, to minds and machines, the existence of God, and positivism and phenomenology.The impact of Godel's theorem on twentieth-century thought is on par with that of Einstein's theory of relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or Keynesian economics. These previously unpublished intimate and informal conversations, however, bring to light and amplify Godel's other major contributions to logic and philosophy. They reveal that there is much more in Godel's philosophy of mathematics than is commonly believed, and more in his philosophy than his philosophy of mathematics.Wang writes that "it is even possible that his quite informal and loosely structured conversations with me, which I am freely using in this book, will turn out to be the fullest existing expression of the diverse components of his inadequately articulated general philosophy."The first two chapters are devoted to Godel's life and mental development. In the chapters that follow, Wang illustrates the quest for overarching solutions and grand unifications of knowledge and action in Godel's written speculations on God and an afterlife. He gives the background and a chronological summary of the conversations, considers Godel's comments on philosophies and philosophers (his support of Husserl's phenomenology and his digressions on Kant and Wittgenstein), and his attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the mind's power over brains and machines. Three chapters are tied together by what Wang perceives to be Godel's governing ideal of philosophy: an exact theory in which mathematics and Newtonian physics serve as a model for philosophy or metaphysics. Finally, in an epilog Wang sketches his own approach to philosophy in contrast to his interpretation of Godel's outlook."

Language, Truth and Logic in Mathematics


Jaakko Hintikka - 1997
    On the one hand, some philosophers (and some mathematicians) take the nature and the results of mathematicians' activities as given, and go on to ask what philosophical morals one might perhaps find in their story. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny. In practice this usually means scrutinizing the logical and linguistic tools mathematicians wield. Such scrutiny can scarcely help relying on philosophical ideas and principles. In other words it can scarcely help being literally a study of language, truth and logic in mathematics, albeit not necessarily in the spirit of AJ. Ayer. As its title indicates, the essays included in the present volume represent the latter approach. In most of them one of the fundamental concepts in the foundations of mathematics and logic is subjected to a scrutiny from a largely novel point of view. Typically, it turns out that the concept in question is in need of a revision or reconsideration or at least can be given a new twist. The results of such a re-examination are not primarily critical, however, but typically open up new constructive possibilities. The consequences of such deconstructions and reconstructions are often quite sweeping, and are explored in the same paper or in others.

Foundations of Inductive Logic Programming


Shan-Hwei Nienhuys-Cheng - 1997
    This self-contained tutorial is the first theoretical introduction to ILP; it provides the reader with a rigorous and sufficiently broad basis for future research in the area.In the first part, a thorough treatment of first-order logic, resolution-based theorem proving, and logic programming is given. The second part introduces the main concepts of ILP and systematically develops the most important results on model inference, inverse resolution, unfolding, refinement operators, least generalizations, and ways to deal with background knowledge. Furthermore, the authors give an overview of PAC learning results in ILP and of some of the most relevant implemented systems.

Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology


Stewart Shapiro - 1997
    The desired continuity between mathematical and, say, scientific language suggests realism, but realism in this context suggests seemingly intractable epistemic problems. As a way out of this dilemma, Shapiro articulates a structuralist approach. On this view, the subject matter of arithmetic, for example, is not a fixed domain of numbers independent of each other, but rather is the natural number structure, the pattern common to any system of objects that has an initial object and successor relation satisfying the induction principle. Using this framework, realism in mathematics can be preserved without troublesome epistemic consequences.Shapiro concludes by showing how a structuralist approach can be applied to wider philosophical questions such as the nature of an object and the Quinean nature of ontological commitment. Clear, compelling, and tautly argued, Shapiro's work, noteworthy both in its attempt to develop a full-length structuralist approach to mathematics and to trace its emergence in the history of mathematics, will be of deep interest to both philosophers and mathematicians.

Introductory Logic: For Christian Private & Home Schools (Student Guide)


Douglas J. Wilson - 1997
    This course is a thorough introduction and serves as both a self-contained course as well as a preparatory course for more advanced studies.