University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1978
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Medieval Logic
  •  1
  •  9
    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
  •  177
    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.
  •  6
    `Exists' is a predicate
    Mind 89 (355): 412-417. 1980.
  •  5
    Best Paper Award
    History and Philosophy of Logic 32 (3): 197-197. 2011.