University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1978
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Medieval Logic
  •  83
    Review of J.c.Beall, Greg Restall, Logical Pluralism (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (5). 2006.
  •  1
    Western Logic
    Journal of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research 27 (1): 13-45. 2010.
    The editors invited us to write a short paper that draws together the main themes of logic in the Western tradition from the Classical Greeks to the modern period. To make it short we had to make it personal. We set out the themes that seemed to us either the deepest, or the most likely to be helpful for an Indian reader.
  •  13
    Freeing assumptions from the Liar paradox
    Analysis 63 (2): 162-166. 2003.
  •  16
  •  122
    Completeness and categoricity: Frege, gödel and model theory
    History and Philosophy of Logic 18 (2): 79-93. 1997.
    Frege’s project has been characterized as an attempt to formulate a complete system of logic adequate to characterize mathematical theories such as arithmetic and set theory. As such, it was seen to fail by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem of 1931. It is argued, however, that this is to impose a later interpretation on the word ‘complete’ it is clear from Dedekind’s writings that at least as good as interpretation of completeness is categoricity. Whereas few interesting first-order mathematical th…Read more
  •  4
    Book Reviews (review)
    with C. B. Schmitt, Thomas Kesselring, Rolf George, Randall R. Dipert, S. J. Surma, A. Grieder, P. M. Simons, Wolfe Mays, David B. Resnik, Allen Stairs, N. C. A. Da Costa, J. W. Van Evra, and Richard L. Epstein
    History and Philosophy of Logic 7 (1): 77-117. 1986.
    MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LOGICSIMON OF FAVERSHAM, Quaestiones super Libro Elenchorum. Text in Latin with introduction and notes in English, edited by Sten Ebbesen, Thomas Izbicki, John Longeway, Francesco del Punta, Eileen Serene and Eleonore Stump. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984. xiv + 270 pp. $3 1.OO.JACOPO ZABARELLA, De methodis libri quatuor; Liber de regressu. Edited by Cesare Vasoli. Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1985. xxxviii+ 193 pp. Lire 57,000.EDITIONSG. W. F. HEGE…Read more
  •  132
    The unity of the fact
    Philosophy 80 (3): 317-342. 2005.
    What binds the constituents of a state of affairs together and provides unity to the fact they constitute? I argue that the fact that they are related is basic and fundamental. This is the thesis of Factualism: the world is a world of facts. I draw three corollaries: first, that the Identity of truth is mistaken, in conflating what represents (the proposition) with what is represented (the fact). Secondly, a popular interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, due to Steinus, whereby false propos…Read more
  •  8
  •  95
    The Medieval Theory of Consequence
    Synthese 187 (3): 899-912. 2012.
    The recovery of Aristotle’s logic during the twelfth century was a great stimulus to medieval thinkers. Among their own theories developed to explain Aristotle’s theories of valid and invalid reasoning was a theory of consequence, of what arguments were valid, and why. By the fourteenth century, two main lines of thought had developed, one at Oxford, the other at Paris. Both schools distinguished formal from material consequence, but in very different ways. In Buridan and his followers in Paris,…Read more
  •  12
    The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2016.
    This volume, the first dedicated and comprehensive companion to medieval logic, covers both the Latin and the Arabic traditions, and shows that they were in fact sister traditions, which both arose against the background of a Hellenistic heritage and which influenced one another over the centuries. A series of chapters by both established and younger scholars covers the whole period including early and late developments, and offers new insights into this extremely rich period in the history of l…Read more
  •  84
    Semantic pollution and syntactic purity
    Review of Symbolic Logic 8 (4): 649-661. 2015.
    Logical inferentialism claims that the meaning of the logical constants should be given, not model-theoretically, but by the rules of inference of a suitable calculus. It has been claimed that certain proof-theoretical systems, most particularly, labelled deductive systems for modal logic, are unsuitable, on the grounds that they are semantically polluted and suffer from an untoward intrusion of semantics into syntax. The charge is shown to be mistaken. It is argued on inferentialist grounds tha…Read more
  •  731
    The philosophy of alternative logics
    In Leila Haaparanta (ed.), The development of modern logic, Oxford University Press. pp. 613-723. 2011.
    This chapter focuses on alternative logics. It discusses a hierarchy of logical reform. It presents case studies that illustrate particular aspects of the logical revisionism discussed in the chapter. The first case study is of intuitionistic logic. The second case study turns to quantum logic, a system proposed on empirical grounds as a resolution of the antinomies of quantum mechanics. The third case study is concerned with systems of relevance logic, which have been the subject of an especial…Read more
  •  11
    A. Broadie: George Lokert, Late‐Scholastic Logician (review)
    Philosophical Books 26 (3): 137-140. 1985.
  •  3
    Quotation and Reach's Puzzle
    Acta Analytica 12 9--20. 1997.
  •  69
    `Exists' is a predicate
    Mind 89 (355): 412-417. 1980.
  •  5
    Best Paper Award
    History and Philosophy of Logic 32 (3): 197-197. 2011.
  •  2
    The Syllogism
    Philosophical Books 24 (1): 14-15. 1983.
  •  20
    Preface
    Philosophia Scientiae 15 1-5. 2011.
    This volume would not exist without the help of all those who contributed to the organisation of the MacColl centenary meeting (Boulogne-sur-Mer, 9--10 October 2009). We are especially grateful to Bruno Béthouart, Jacques Dubucs, Gerhard Heinzmann, and Shahid Rahman. We would also like to thank Michael Astroh, Sandrine Avril, Anny Bégard, Christian Berner, Pierre-Édouard Bour, Peggy Cardon, Emmanuelle Jablonsky, Christian Mac Coll, Tony Mann, Gildas Nzokou, Max Papyle, Bernard Quéh...
  •  5
    Logics and languages
    Philosophical Books 15 (2): 1-3. 1974.
  •  15
    The Bounds of Logic. A Generalized Viewpoint (review)
    Philosophical Books 34 (3): 158-160. 1993.
  •  99
    Square of Opposition: A Diagram and a Theory in Historical Perspective
    History and Philosophy of Logic 35 (4): 315-316. 2014.
    We are pleased to present this special issue of the journal History and Philosophy of Logic dedicated to the square of opposition.The square of opposition is a diagram and a theory of opposition re...
  •  227
    Identity and reference
    Mind 87 (348): 533-552. 1978.
  •  1430
    Merely Confused Supposition
    Franciscan Studies 40 (1): 265-97. 1980.
    In this article, we discuss the notion of merely confused supposition as it arose in the medieval theory of suppositio personalis. The context of our analysis is our formalization of William of Ockham's theory of supposition sketched in Mind 86 (1977), 109-13. The present paper is, however, self-contained, although we assume a basic acquaintance with supposition theory. The detailed aims of the paper are: to look at the tasks that supposition theory took on itself and to use our formalization to…Read more
  •  32
    Paradoxes of Signification
    New Content is Available for Vivarium. 2018.
    _ Source: _Page Count 21 Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine’s successors in the fourteenth century. Bradwardine’s solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of …Read more