Modern developments in philosophy have provided us with tools, logical and methodological, that were not available to Medieval thinkers - a development that has its dangers as well as opportunities. Modern tools allow one to penetrate old texts and analyze old problems in new ways, offering interpretations that the old thinkers could not have known. But unless one remains sensitive to the fact that language has undergone changes, bringing with it a shift in the meaning of terminology, one can easily perpetrate an anachronism.
Yet there is a growing need to bring modern tools and to bear...

This volume consists of papers delivered at the conference 'The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy', organised in celebration of the hun dredth anniversary ofKazimierz Twardowski's first lecture as Professor of Phi losophy at Lvov University. This lecture can be regarded as the starting point of the development of analytic philosophy in Poland, which culminated in the Warsaw School of Logic. The conference was held in Lvov (15-17 November) and Warsaw (19-21 November 1995). It was organised jointly by the Ukrainian Academy of Sci ences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The...

Our preferences determine how we act and think, but exactly what the mechanics are and how they work is a central cause of concern in many disciplines. This book uses techniques from modern logics of information flow and action to develop a unified new theory of what preference is and how it changes. The theory emphasizes reasons for preference, as well as its entanglement with our beliefs. Moreover, the book provides dynamic logical systems which describe the explicit triggers driving preference change, including new information, suggestions, and commands. In sum, the book creates new...

This book intends to show that radical naturalism (or physicalism), nominalism and strict finitism account for the applications of classical mathematics in current scientific theories. The applied mathematical theories developed in the book include the basics of calculus, metric space theory, complex analysis, Lebesgue integration, Hilbert spaces, and semi-Riemann geometry (sufficient for the applications in classical quantum mechanics and general relativity). The fact that so much applied mathematics can be developed within such a weak, strictly finitistic system, is surprising in itself. It...

The chapters in the present volume go beyond 'classical' extensional logic with respect to one important factor: they all include among the semantic constituents representations of so-called 'possible worlds'. The inclusion of such 'indices' has turned out to be the semantic mainstay in dealing with a number of issues having to do with intensional features of natural and artificial languages. It is, of course, an open question whether 'possible world' semantics is in the final analysis the proper solution to the many problems and puzzles intensional constructions raise for the logical...

It is somewhat surprising to find out how little serious theorizing there is in philosophy (and in social psychology as well as sociology) on the nature of social actions or joint act. hons in the sense of actions performed together by several agents. Actions performed by single agents have been extensively discussed both in philosophy and in psycho ogy. There is, ac cordingly, a booming field called action theory in philosophy but it has so far strongly concentrated on actions performed by single agents only. We of course should not forget game theory, a discipline that systematically...

Historians of Latin American philosophy have paid relatively little attention to the development of philosophical analysis in Latin America. There are two reasons for this neglect: First, they have been primarily concerned with the forma tive period of philosophical development, in particular with the so called "founders" of La ti n American philosophy. And second. philosophical analysis did not become a noticeable philosophical trend in Latin America until recent years. True. a nunber of Latin American philosophers took notice of Moore. Russell. the members of the Vienna Circle and other...

The papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium "Reduktion in der Wissenschaft: Struktur, Beispiele, philos- ophische PrObleme", held in Bielefeld, West Germany, July 18- 21, 1983. Altogether eighteen talks were delivered at the symposium, and all appear here with the exception of Professor Ehlers' address. In addition, we are pleased to be able to include three papers by invited participants (Kamiah, Ludwig, Scheibe) who were unable to attend the meeting. The meeting itself brought together a sizeable group of logicians, philosophers and working scientists to discuss and debate...

This book on the structure and role of time in physical theories addresses itself to scientists and philosophers intereste:'i in the 'no man's lard' between science and philosophy, in particular between physics and philoso- phy. The p:lint of departure is physical time, Le. time as usErl 1:[yen] physicists in their theories; but the analysis is not oonfined to a purely physical level but caries the problem into the domain of philosophical in- quiry. Altoough the book presupp:lses some knowledge of physics, I have avoided, wherever p:lssible, the use of advanced mathematics and technical...

In this book, I attempt to lay the axiomatic foundations of metaphysics by developing and applying a (formal) theory of abstract objects. The cornerstones include a principle which presents precise conditions under which there are abstract objects and a principle which says when apparently distinct such objects are in fact identical. The principles are constructed out of a basic set of primitive notions, which are identified at the end of the Introduction, just before the theorizing begins. The main reason for producing a theory which defines a logical space of abstract objects is that it may...