John Burgess

WESTERN SCHOLARS HAVE POINTED OUT BOTH THE USEFULNESS AND limitations of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. This essay relates Niebuhr's five types to discussions of church and culture in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. I propose a sixth type, Christ in culture, that best illuminates the Church's current program of votserkovlenie. To its Russian representatives, "Christ in culture" enabled the Christian faith to survive communist efforts to destroy the Church, and this cultural legacy continues to define Russia's national identity today. The Church's task, therefore, is not to convert Russians but rather to call them back to their historic self-understanding by means of historical commemoration, religious education, and social outreach. The essay critically evaluates this program of in-churching and the possibilities of a Christ-in-culture type for understanding distinctive features of historically Christian cultures in both East and West.

This volume reprints a dozen of the author’s papers, most with substantial postscripts, and adds one new one. The bulk of the material is on topics in philosophy of language, but there are also two papers on philosophy of mathematics written after the appearance of the author’s collected papers on that subject, and one on epistemology. As to the substance of Field’s contributions, limitations of space preclude doing much more below than indicating the range of issues addressed, and the general orientation taken towards them. As to the style of his writing, it well exhibits the first of the two virtues, clarity and conciseness, that one looks for in philosophical prose.

Recently it has become almost the received wisdom in certain quarters that Kripke models are appropriate only for something like metaphysical modalities, and not for logical modalities. Here the line of thought leading to Kripke models, and reasons why they are no less appropriate for logical than for other modalities, are explained. It is also indicated where the fallacy in the argument leading to the contrary conclusion lies. The lessons learned are then applied to the question of the status of the formula.

This fourth edition of one of the classic logic textbooks has been thoroughly revised by John Burgess. The aim is to increase the pedagogical value of the book for the core market of students of philosophy and for students of mathematics and computer science as well. This book has become a classic because of its accessibility to students without a mathematical background, and because it covers not simply the staple topics of an intermediate logic course such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, but also a large number of optional topics from Turing's theory of computability to Ramsey's theorem. John Burgess has now enhanced the book by adding a selection of problems at the end of each chapter, and by reorganising and rewriting chapters to make them more independent of each other and thus to increase the range of options available to instructors as to what to cover and what to defer.