University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1978
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Medieval Logic
  •  16
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    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
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    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
  •  92
    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
  •  10
    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
  •  11
    A. Broadie: George Lokert, Late‐Scholastic Logician (review)
    Philosophical Books 26 (3): 137-140. 1985.
  •  81
    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
  •  696
    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