Abstract

Sooner or later there comes a time in the history of a science when it pauses from dealing with its innumerable special problems and returns to the study of first principles and the foundations that delimit its particular field of inquiry. The result is usually a radical revision of a number of established basic ideas, the discovery of some hitherto unknown dimension in the field, and the emergence of an appropriate paradigm for investigating the field. It was the fate of logic to be one of the first fields to undergo such a reformation, which lasted more than two centuries. Its instigators were Rene Descartes and Benedict Spinoza