Although Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 2) was perhaps the first person to consider the part-whole relationship to be a proper subject matter for philosophic inquiry, the Polish logician Stanislow Lesniewski [15] is generally given credit for the first formal treatment of the subject matter in his Mereology.1 Woodger [30] and Tarski [24] made use of a specific adaptation of Lesniewski's work as a basis for a formal theory of physical things and their parts. The term 'calculus of individuals' was (...) introduced by Leonard and Goodman [14] in their presentation of a system very similar to Tarski's adaptation of Lesniewski's Mereology. Contemporaneously with Lesniewski's development of his Mereology, Whitehead [27] and [28] was developing a theory of extensive abstraction based on the two-place predicate, 'x extends over y\ which is the converse of 'x is a part of y\ This system, according to Russell [22], was to have been the fourth volume of their Pήncipia Mathematica, the never-published volume on geometry. Both Lesniewski [15] and Tarski [25] have recognized the similarities between Whitehead's early work and Lesniewski's Mereology. Between the publication of Whitehead's early work and the publication of Process and Reality [29], Theodore de Laguna [7] published a suggestive alternative basis for Whitehead's theory. This led Whitehead, in Process and Reality, to publish a revised form of his theory based on the two-place predicate, 'x is extensionally connected with y\ It is the purpose of this paper to present a calculus of individuals based on this new Whiteheadian primitive predicate. (shrink)

In Process and Reality, Whitehead explicitly states what he conceives his task to be: “Speculative Philosophy,” he writes, “is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” He then goes on to explain what he means by the key terms in this passage. By ‘in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted’, “I mean,” he explains, “that everything of which we (...) are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme.” This universality, or all-comprehensiveness, of the system is interpreted in terms of two characteristics: applicability and adequacy. Whitehead explains: “Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.” It is these two characteristics of the system which give an explication of the term ‘necessary’ as applied to the system of general ideas: “The metaphysical first principles can never fail of exemplification. We can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway.”. (shrink)

Rudolph Carnap’s Aufbau was one of the more ambitious philosophical programs of the twentieth century. His proposal was to begin with elementarerlebnisse —cross sections of one total stream of experience temporally limited by the least perceivable segment of time—and an undefined primitive relation, recollection of similarity, holding between the elementary experiences. Without any further non-logical terms, the goal was to utilize a logic, such as that of Principia Mathematica, and actually to construct logically, or to define formally, all the kinds (...) of entities, phenomenal, physical, psychological and cultural, which we usually take to make up our world. Unfortunately, the program is not completed. Only what Carnap refers to as the lower levels is actually formally constructed—that is, what might be called the phenomenal level. The remainder of the constructional program is only suggested in outline. (shrink)

The title of this volume -- Logic, God and Metaphysics -- is carefully chosen and, at the same time, descriptive of its main focus. In the twentieth century, the interests of most philosophers and theologians have fallen into only one of the three areas indicated -- logic, god or metaphysics. Since much of Anglo-American philosophy in this century has been analytic and antimetaphysical because of the influence of positivism, there have been few attempts at continuing metaphysical inquiry. In the early (...) part of the century, the logical atomists combined logic and metaphysics by arguing that the structure of reality is mirrored isomorphically in the structure of a formal, logically perfect, truth-functional language, but their effort was short-lived. Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophers have focused upon god and metaphysics but usually by adopting terminology and distinctions which are unique to certain systems -- making rigorous, logical analysis difficult or impossible. The papers included in this volume are illustrative of the application of careful, rigorous logical analysis to do critical philosophy of religion and what has been called constructive metaphysics. (shrink)

In this work Ivor Leclerc argues for the contemporary need for a philosophy of nature, a discipline which he takes to be a casualty of the acceptance of the early nineteenth century conception of physics as a mechanics, the science of matter in locomotion in space and time. One of the main consequences of this conception of physics, which grows out of the seventeenth century conception of nature, has been that philosophy cannot have "nature" as its object; rather, the object (...) of philosophy is "science" itself, not nature. The result of this consequence has been, according to Leclerc, "an obscuring, indeed a blocking, of the realization of the full magnitude and extent of the twentieth-century developments in science, in particular of the most fundamental respects, namely, the ontological and metaphysical, in which those developments have affected the conception of nature". This has worked to the disadvantage of both the philosopher and the scientist. In Part 1 Leclerc is primarily concerned with making the above case, while Part 2 is devoted to a historical investigation into the development of the concepts involved in the conception of "physics as a mechanics" and Part III is primarily devoted to a criticism of this view of physics and a suggestion concerning the direction a philosophy of nature should take in the later part of the twentieth century. (shrink)