•  3
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Robert Kirk, Mirella Capozzi, K. Misiuna, T. Boswell, Maria J. Frapolli, Alan R. Perreiah, Victor Sánchez Valencia, James Gasser, D. P. Henry, E. J. Lowe, Besprechung von Guillermo Guillermo Bottcher, and Wolfe Mays
    History and Philosophy of Logic 15 (2): 237-263. 1994.
    Patrick Grim, The incomplete universe:totality, knowledge, and truth. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1991. xiv + 165pp. £22.50 Jan SebestikLogique et mathématique chez Bernard Bolzano. Paris:Vrin, 1992. 522 pp. 198Fr J. De Lorenzo, Kant y la matemâtica. El uso constructivo de la razön pura Madrid:Editorial Tecnos, 1992. 180 pp. No price stated F. Coniglione, R. Poli And J. Woleintski, Polish scientific philosophy:The Lvov-Warsaw school. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1993. …Read more
  •  6
    Bernard Bolzano: His Life and Work
    with Jan Sebestík
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Bernard Bolzano is increasingly recognized as one of the greatest nineteenth-century philosophers. A philosopher and mathematician of rare talent, he made ground-breaking contributions to logic, the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. Many of the larger features of later analytic philosophy first appear in his work: for example, the separation of logic from psychology, his sophisticated understanding of mathematical proof, his definition of log…Read more
  •  83
    Review Essays: The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna StationThe Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (review)
    with Rolf George, J. Alberto Coffa, and Linda Wessels
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 461. 1996.
    The impressive volume before us started out as an attempt to write “the history of epistemology since Kant, the way Carnap would have written it had he been Hegel.” Coffa began his project in 1981 while a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and had finished a “good penultimate draft” when he suddenly died, after a brief illness, on 30 Dec., 1984. The title alludes to Edmund Wilson’s classic study of revolutionary ideology, To the Finland Station. This is no accident and …Read more
  •  55
    Review Essays: Snails Rolled Up Contrary to All SenseThe Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space
    with Rolf George, James Van Cleve, and Robert E. Frederick
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (2): 459. 1994.
  •  43
    Strategies for conceptual change: Ratio and proportion in classical Greek mathematics
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26 (1): 107-131. 1995.
    …all men begin… by wondering that things are as they are…as they do about…the incommensurability of the diagonal of the square with the side; for it seems wonderful to all who have not yet seen the reason, that there is a thing which cannot be measured even by the smallest unit. But we must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case in these instances too when men learn the cause; for there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diag…Read more
  •  1
    A Critical Introduction to Bolzano's Philosophy
    Dissertation, University of Waterloo (Canada). 1996.
    Received accounts of nineteenth-century thought make little or no room for the substantial contributions of the Bohemian philosopher Bernard Bolzano . This thesis constitutes a sustained attempt to show that this omission is a serious mistake, that Bolzano is more rightly treated as one of the major figures of western philosophy. To his contemporaries, Bolzano was known primarily as a teacher, religious leader, and social reformer. Outside of central Europe, though, he became known primarily thr…Read more
  •  28
    Largely ignored in Germany during the nineteenth century, Bolzano was certainly better known in Austria, in particular among Brentano’s students, who enthusiastically studied his Theory of science. In this respect it makes sense to speak of Bolzano as belonging to a tradition of Austrian philosophy. Yet an examination of the reception of Bolzano’s ideas among Brentano’s students indicates that he was not always well understood. This article discusses a particular case, Twardowski’s reaction to B…Read more
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Philosophia Mathematica 4 (1): 59-72. 1996.
  •  71
    Epistemic Coherence
    with Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith, and Cameron Shelley
    In R. Elio (ed.), Common sense, reasoning, and rationality. Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science (Vol. 11), Oxford University Press. pp. 104-131. 2002.
    Many contemporary philosophers favor coherence theories of knowledge (Bender 1989, BonJour 1985, Davidson 1986, Harman 1986, Lehrer 1990). But the nature of coherence is usually left vague, with no method provided for determining whether a belief should be accepted or rejected on the basis of its coherence or incoherence with other beliefs. Haack's (1993) explication of coherence relies largely on an analogy between epistemic justification and crossword puzzles. We show in this paper how epistem…Read more
  •  28
    Kant and Bolzano on Analyticity
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 95 (3): 298-335. 2013.
  •  7
    Bernard Bolzano: Theory of Science (edited book)
    with Rolf George
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    This is the first full English translation of Bernard Bolzano's masterwork, the Theory of Science (1837)--a monumental and revolutionary study in logic, epistemology, heuristics, and scientific methodology. Each volume includes an introduction which illuminates the historical context of Bolzano's work and its continuing relevance
  •  3
    Theory of Science (edited book)
    with Rolf George
    Oxford University Press UK. 2014.
    This edition provides the first complete English translation of Bernard Bolzano's four-volume Wissenschaftslehre or Theory of Science, a masterwork of theoretical philosophy. First published in 1837, the Wissenschaftslehre is a monumental, wholly original study in logic, epistemology, heuristics, and scientific methodology. Unlike most logical studies of the period, it is not concerned with the "psychological self-consciousness of the thinking mind." Instead, it develops logic as the science of …Read more
  •  39
    Remarks on Bolzano's Conception of Necessary Truth
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (4): 1-21. 2012.
    This essay presents a new interpretation of Bolzano's account of necessary truth as set out in ?182 of the Theory of Science. According to this interpretation, Bolzano's conception is closely related to that of Leibniz, with some important differences. In the first place, Bolzano's conception of necessary truth embraces not only what Leibniz called metaphysical or brute necessities but also moral necessities (truths grounded in God's choice of the best among all metaphysical possibilities). Seco…Read more
  •  121
    Etchemendy and Bolzano on Logical Consequence
    with Mark Burke
    History and Philosophy of Logic 31 (1): 3-29. 2010.
    In a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, John Etchemendy has argued that the standard semantical account of logical consequence, due in its essentials to Alfred Tarski, is fundamentally mistaken. He argues that, while Tarski's definition requires us to classify the terms of a language as logical or non-logical, no such division is guaranteed to deliver the correct extension of our pre-theoretical or intuitive consequence relation. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Tarski's ac…Read more
  •  20
    Bolzano as logician
    with Rolf George
    In Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic, Elsevier. pp. 3--177. 2004.
  •  50
    On Bolzano's Concept of a Sum
    History and Philosophy of Logic 34 (2). 2013.
    Alongside his groundbreaking work in logic, Bernard Bolzano (1781?1848) made important contributions to ontology, notably with his theory of collections. Recent work has done much to elucidate Bolzano's conceptions, but his notion of a sum has proved stubbornly resistant to complete understanding. This paper offers a new interpretation of Bolzano's concept of a sum. I argue that, although Bolzano's presentation is defective, his conception is unexceptionable, and has important applications, nota…Read more
  •  25
    Contents: Acknowledgements. Conventions. Preface. Biographical sketch. 1 Introduction. 2 The Contributions. 3 Early work in analysis. 4 The Theory of Science . 5. Later mathematical studies. A On Kantian Intuitions. B The Bolzano-Cauchy Theorem
  •  59
    Bolzano on Necessary Existence
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96 (3): 320-359. 2014.
    This paper is devoted to an examination of Bolzano’s notion of necessary existence, which has so far received relatively little attention in the literature. We situate Bolzano’s ideas in their historical context and show how he proposed to correct various flaws of his predecessors’ definitions. Further, we relate Bolzano’s conception to his metaphysical and theological assumptions, arguing that some consequences of his definition which have been deemed counterintuitive by some of his interpreter…Read more
  •  33
    Bolzano and the Traditions of Analysis
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 53 (1): 61-85. 1997.
    Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, wrote that modern analytical philosophy had its origins in the construction of modern functional analysis by Weierstrass and others. As it turns out, Bolzano, in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, had already made important contributions'to the creation of "Weierstrassian" analysis, some of which were well known to Weierstrass and his circle. In addition, his mathematical research was guided by a methodology which articulated many of …Read more
  •  47
    Bernard Bolzano of Prague was one of the few thinkers of his time who combined real talent in mathematics and philosophy. He was especially drawn to the common ground between these fields, interested in questions of method and what would today be called foundations . Interestingly, he was neither a professional mathematician nor a professional philosopher. As a young man, he had decided that his first priority must be to work for the reform and improvement of society. This led him, after much re…Read more
  •  104
    The Beyträge at 200: Bolzano's quiet revolution in the philosophy of mathematics
    with Jan Sebestik
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (8). 2013.
    This paper surveys Bolzano's Beyträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik (Contributions to a better-grounded presentation of mathematics) on the 200th anniversary of its publication. The first and only published issue presents a definition of mathematics, a classification of its subdisciplines, and an essay on mathematical method, or logic. Though underdeveloped in some areas (including,somewhat surprisingly, in logic), it is nonetheless a radically innovative work, where Bolzano …Read more
  •  142
    Kant and Bolzano on logical form
    Kant Studien 102 (4): 477-491. 2011.
    In the works of Kant and his followers, the notion of form plays an important role in explaining the apriority, necessity and certainty of logic. Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), an important early critic of Kant, found the Kantians' definitions of form imprecise and their explanations of the special status of logic deeply unsatisfying. Proposing his own conception of form, Bolzano developed radically different views on logic, truth in virtue of form, and other matters. This essay presents Bolzano's…Read more
  •  23
    Bolzano and the Traditions of Analysis
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 53 (1): 61-85. 1997.
    Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, wrote that modern analytical philosophy had its origins in the construction of modern functional analysis by Weierstrass and others. As it turns out, Bolzano, in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, had already made important contributions'to the creation of "Weierstrassian" analysis, some of which were well known to Weierstrass and his circle. In addition, his mathematical research was guided by a methodology which articulated many of …Read more