University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1978
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Medieval Logic
  •  12
    Paul of Venice joined the Austin Friars at an early age and was sent by them from Padua to study at Oxford in 1390. When he returned, full of ideas and laden with books, he began his prodigious writing career with several books on logic, including the Logica Magna, which runs to some half a million words. The current volume contains the final treatise, on insolubles - that is, logical paradoxes. After surveying fifteen previous solutions, Paul develops his own, based on the idea that such propos…Read more
  •  18
    Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 40 (161): 537-538. 1990.
  •  4
    Dui luo ji de si kao: luo ji zhe xue dao lun
    Liaoning jiao yu chu ban she. 1998.
    A Chinese translation of Thinking about Logic. In this book, Stephen Read sets out to rescue logic from its undeserved reputation as an inflexible, dogmatic discipline by demonstrating that its technicalities and processes are founded on assumptions which are themselves amenable to philosophical investigation. He examines the fundamental principles of consequence, logical truth and correct inference within the context of logic, and shows that the principles by which we delineate consequences are…Read more
  • Bradwardine and epistemic paradox
    In Christoph Kann, Benedikt Löewe, Christian Rode & Sara Liana Uckelman (eds.), Modern views of medieval logic, Peeters. 2018.
  • Modality in medieval philosophy
    In Otávio Bueno & Scott A. Shalkowski (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modality, Routledge. 2018.
  •  226
    This paper provides a philosophical analysis and a new edition of an anonymous Epitome of John Dumbleton’s solution to the semantic paradoxes. The first part of this paper briefly presents Dumbleton’s cassationist solution to the semantic paradoxes, which the English philosopher proposes in his Summa Logicae, written in the 1330s–40s. The second part investigates the solution to various types of insolubles proposed by the anonymous author of the Epitome. The third part provides a new critical ed…Read more
  •  27
    ‘Everything True Will Be False’: Paul of Venice and a Medieval Yablo Paradox
    History and Philosophy of Logic 43 (4): 332-346. 2022.
    In his Quadratura, Paul of Venice considers a sophism involving time and tense which appears to show that there is a valid inference which is also invalid. Consider this inference concerning some proposition A : A will signify only that everything true will be false, so A will be false. Call this inference B. A and B are the basis of an insoluble-that is, a Liar-like paradox. Like the sequence of statements in Yablo's paradox, B looks ahead to a moment when A will be false, yet that moment may n…Read more
  •  13
    The Oxford Calculator Roger Swyneshed put forward three provocative claims in his treatise on insolubles, written in the early 1330s, of which the second states that there is a formally valid inference with true premises and false conclusion. His example deployed the Liar paradox as the conclusion of the inference: ‘The conclusion of this inference is false, so this conclusion is false’. His account of insolubles supported his claim that the conclusion is false, and so the premise, referring to …Read more
  •  7
    Denotation, Paradox and Multiple Meanings
    In Can Başkent & Thomas Macaulay Ferguson (eds.), Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency, Springer Verlag. pp. 439-454. 2019.
    In line with the Principle of Uniform Solution, Graham Priest has challenged advocates like myself of the “multiple-meanings” solution to the paradoxes of truth and knowledge, due to the medieval logician Thomas Bradwardine, to extend this account to a similar solution to the paradoxes of denotation, such as Berry’s, König’s and Richard’s. I here rise to this challenge by showing how to adapt Bradwardine’s principles of truth and signification for propositions to corresponding principles of deno…Read more
  •  157
    In his Quadratura, Paul of Venice considers a sophism involving time and tense which appears to show that there is a valid inference which is also invalid. His argument runs as follows: consider this inference concerning some proposition A: A will signify only that everything true will be false, so A will be false. Call this inference B. Then B is valid because the opposite of its conclusion is incompatible with its premise. In accordance with the standard doctrine of ampliation, Paul takes A to…Read more
  •  32
    Swyneshed, Aristotle and the Rule of Contradictory Pairs
    Logica Universalis 14 (1): 27-50. 2020.
    Roger Swyneshed, in his treatise on insolubles, dating from the early 1330s, drew three notorious corollaries from his solution. The third states that there is a contradictory pair of propositions both of which are false. This appears to contradict what Whitaker, in his iconoclastic reading of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, dubbed “The Rule of Contradictory Pairs”, which requires that in every such pair, one must be true and the other false. Whitaker argued that, immediately after defining the …Read more
  •  1249
    Although the theory of the assertoric syllogism was Aristotle's great invention, one which dominated logical theory for the succeeding two millenia, accounts of the syllogism evolved and changed over that time. Indeed, in the twentieth century, doctrines were attributed to Aristotle which lost sight of what Aristotle intended. One of these mistaken doctrines was the very form of the syllogism: that a syllogism consists of three propositions containing three terms arranged in four figures. Yet a…Read more
  •  212
    Obligations, Sophisms and Insolubles
    National Research University “Higher School of Economics” - (Series WP6 “Humanities”). 2013.
    The focus of the paper is a sophism based on the proposition ‘This is Socrates’ found in a short treatise on obligational casus attributed to William Heytesbury. First, the background to the puzzle in Walter Burley’s traditional account of obligations (the responsio antiqua), and the objections and revisions made by Richard Kilvington and Roger Swyneshed, are presented. All six types of obligations described by Burley are outlined, including sit verum, the type used in the sophism. Kilvington an…Read more
  •  5
    Bertrand Russell's philosophy
    Philosophical Books 16 (1): 21-24. 1975.
  •  15
    Richard Montague: Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 26 (103): 182. 1976.
  •  6
    From mathematics to philosophy
    Philosophical Books 15 (3): 12-14. 1974.
  • Proceedings of the Conference: Hugh MacColl and the Tradition of Logic
    with M. Astroh
    Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic 3. 1998.
  •  2
    Book Reviews (review)
    with E. J. Ashworth, Rezensiert von Siegfried Blasche, Rezensiert von H. C. Döring, A. Grieder, P. J. Loptson, P. H. Nidditch, and T. Blackmore John
    History and Philosophy of Logic 3 (1): 91-110. 1982.
    MEDIEVAI AND RENAISSANCF LOGICWILLIAM OFOCKHAM, Ockham's theory of propositions. Part I1 of Summa logicae. Translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman, with an introduction by Alfred J. Freddoso. University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. viii + 212 pp. £ 12.00.WILHELM RISSE, Bibliagraphia Logica. Verzeichnis der Handschriften zur Logik. Band IV. Hildesheim, New York: Georg 0lm.s Verlag, 1979. vii + 390pp. DM 98.G. W.F. H EGEL, Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objektive Logic Herause…Read more
  •  1456
    Anti-Exceptionalism about Logic
    Australasian Journal of Logic 16 (7): 298. 2019.
    Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the doctrine that logic does not require its own epistemology, for its methods are continuous with those of science. Although most recently urged by Williamson, the idea goes back at least to Lakatos, who wanted to adapt Popper's falsicationism and extend it not only to mathematics but to logic as well. But one needs to be careful here to distinguish the empirical from the a posteriori. Lakatos coined the term 'quasi-empirical' `for the counterinstances to puta…Read more
  •  497
    Roger Swyneshed, in his treatise on insolubles (logical paradoxes), dating from the early 1330s, drew three notorious corollaries of his solution. The third states that there is a contradictory pair of propositions both of which are false. This appears to contradict the Rule of Contradictory Pairs, which requires that in every such pair, one must be true and the other false. Looking back at Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione, we find that Aristotle himself, immediately after defining the no…Read more
  •  28
    Replacing Truth
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256): 535-537. 2014.
  •  32
    Sheffer’s stroke: A study in proof-theoretic harmony
    Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 34 (1): 7-23. 1999.
    In order to explicate Gentzen’s famous remark that the introduction-rules for logical constants give their meaning, the elimination-rules being simply consequences of the meaning so given, we develop natural deduction rules for Sheffer’s stroke, alternative denial. The first system turns out to lack Double Negation. Strengthening the introduction-rules by allowing the introduction of Sheffer’s stroke into a disjunctive context produces a complete system of classical logic, one which preserves th…Read more
  •  114
    The logician's central concern is with the validity of argument. A logical theory ought, therefore, to provide a general criterion of validity. This book sets out to find such a criterion, and to describe the philosophical basis and the formal theory of a logic in which the premises of a valid argument are relevant to its conclusion. The notion of relevance required for this theory is obtained by an analysis of the grounds for asserting a formula in a proof.
  •  16
    Identity and harmony
    Analysis 64 (2): 113-119. 2004.
  •  7
    Questiones libri Porphirii (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 69 (2): 400-401. 2015.