Abstract

Martin presents fifteen previously unpublished essays which he wrote before 1973. Despite several references to his earlier books such as Truth and Denotation, these essays will be intelligible to those who have not yet read anything by R. M. Martin as long as you can master long formulations in the notation of a formal first-order language. Indeed, these essays can serve as an introduction to the work of Martin. The first three essays present Martin's metaphysical system. Essays 4, 5, and 6 amplify his system by showing how a wide variety of sentences can have their logical form represented in the formal language which displays Martin's ontology. In the remaining nine essays he critically evaluates positions of other philosophers such as Hiz, Carnap, Quine, Fitch, Chisholm, Popper, Sellars, Heyting, Lorenzen, and Putnam, from the perspective of his system. Because his systematic approach unifies all of the papers and because he uses technical terms in the development of his system, it is regrettable that the book offers no index.