Peter Simons

In "meaning and modality" lewy claims the only ground for rejecting disjunctive syllogism as acceptable for entailment is rejection of bivalence. Examining lewis's 'proofs' of the paradoxes of strict implication he suggests the proof of 'if a then (b or not-B)' suppresses a premiss, Restoration of which blocks the paradox, Whereas the proof of 'if (a and not-A) then b' cannot be so blocked. But the paradoxes are dual, So he should have treated them dually by restoring a suppressed disjunct in the consequent of the second. When this is done, The second paradox is blocked and disjunctive syllogism fares no better than the principle lewy discarded

Stanisław Leśniewski was one of the two originators and drivers of the Warsaw School of logic. This article describes his work chronologically, from his early philosophical work in Lvov to his highly original logical systems of protothetic, ontology and mereology. His struggles to overcome logical antinomies, his absolute commitment to logical clarity and precision, and his antipathy towards set theory made his nominalistic approach to logic among the most original of the twentieth century, while his early death and the loss of his papers meant his work was only gradually discovered and appreciated outside Poland.

The three young philosophers Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith have become well-known in the last few years especially in German-speaking analytical philosophy and phenomenology circles. This is on the one hand as a result of their historical and systematic philosophical work; but it is also because of the provocative way in which they represent their philosophy. Because they often appear in threes, they have become known as the "gang of three" or "three musketeers" or even – and this in an admiring sense – "mafiosi" (Rescher). They are known primarily for the small workshops they have been organizing in uncomplicated Anglo-Saxon manner all over Europe. Their goal has been to show that analytic philosophy as it has been pursued up to now is in need of reform and also that the history of scientific philosophizing is not identical to the history of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. Above all, they have tried to make more well known the Austrian tradition of scientific philosophy, and they can be given credit for having done much to promote the current interest in this tradition, which means: the history of Austrian philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries and its historical context in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

ABSTRACT There is more than one way to kill a cat. What are ways? Very little has been written about them in general, but they appear at crucial places in many philosophical discussions. Clarity over the ontology of ways could help in several areas of philosophy. After indicating where ways have been mentioned, I discuss briefly the corresponding linguistic feature, adverbs of manner, before outlining three theories: a Platonistic one making ways a complex kind of function, a Davidsonian one in which ways are properties of events, and finally the theory I prefer, a particularist one based on the concept of a higher-order trope. The latter is connected with the theory of truth-makers and avoids ontological commitment to corresponding general objects

This chapter is concerned with the second of the four books of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity, which bears the title “The Categories.” It occupies 164 pages, a fifth of the total. While most systematic metaphysicians treat of categories in some form, it is rare for one to discuss the topic at such length: what we have is practically a treatise within a treatise. Alexander understands categories to be those qualities of space-time that are pervasive and fundamental. A comparative exposition is given of Alexander’s theory of categories, with allusions to Kant and Hegel. It is argued that one distinctive aspect of Alexander’s theory of categories is that it is realist through and through, unlike Kant’s. A critical evaluation is then given of how Alexander describes and infers his list of categories, showing what lessons there are to be learnt for contemporary metaphysics.

Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for their work in formal ontology, and illustrates that through the application of formal methods the ancient discipline of ontology may be put on a firm methodological basis. The essays not only illuminate the nature of ontology and its relation to other areas, in language, logic and everyday life, but also demonstrate that common issues from the analytical and phenomenological traditions may be discussed without ideological barriers. Audience: advanced students of and specialists in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, database engineering.

French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. The authors uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity. The theory is compared with that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity and suggesting how to overcome Wittgenstein’s problem of negation.

Frege's obscure key concept of the unsaturatedness of functions is clarified with the help of the concepts of dependent and independent parts and foundation relations used by Husserl in describing the ontology of complex wholes. Sentential unity in Frege, Husserl and Wittgenstein: all have a similar explanation. As applied to linguistic expressions, the terms 'unsaturated' and 'incomplete' are ambiguous: they may mean the ontological property of Unselbständigkeit, inability to exist alone, or the property of being what categorial grammar calls a functor. Separation of these two senses resolves a dispute between Dummett and Geach on the nature of predicates.

Russell wrote in 1918 in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: When I speak of a fact ... I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. If I say 'It is raining', what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of the weather. The condition of weather that makes my state­ment true (or false as the case may be), is what I should call a 'fact'. If I say, 'Socrates is dead', my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence which happened in Athens long ago. This classic statement of Russell's version of the correspondence theory of truth is defective on one point only: Russell was unwise to use the word 'fact'. Objects which perform the semantic role Russell accords to facts I shall call simply truth-makers.