The injection of modality and strict implication into philosophical logic traditionally has invoked a common objection: conceptual gains achieved by introducing modal notions just aren't outweighed by the technical complexities of modality. For example, it is often pointed out that modal notions are introduced to eliminate the paradoxical aspects of material implication only to lead in turn to "paradoxes of strict implication.".

In the last of this set of ten essays, "How do Realism, Material and Dialectics Fare in Contemporary Science?," Professor Bunge invites his audience to join him in developing a philosophy he chooses to call logical materialism. This philosophy presupposes mathematical logic and includes a critical realist epistemology wherein scientific theories are symbolic, partial representations of things out there, and a dynamical materialist ontology wherein every existent is an ever changing system situated in emerging multiple levels of complexity and organization (...) the behavior of which is lawful, both of which are seen as programmatic. In arriving at this program, Bunge is both critical of and shares important points with the dominate Anglo-American approaches to philosophy of science. For example, with the tradition of logical positivism-empiricism he shares the heavy use of formal logic, semantics, and axiomatization, as a way to understanding scientific theories. At the same time he applauds the historico-philosophical tradition for its careful attention to the history of science and he insists that real science must be the object of analysis in philosophy of science, rather than what he considers to be unilluminating examples like green emeralds or black ravens. (shrink)

The stated aim of this investigation is to clarify and critically examine the philosophical concepts inherent in the cosmological argument: he aspires to investigate the argument rather than to either refute critics or support defenders. He treats both the thirteenth century versions of Aquinas and Duns Scotus and the eighteenth century versions developed by Samuel Clarke and Leibniz, but attaches greater importance and spends more time with the latter, finding them both more sophisticated and more fruitful for investigation. The eighteenth (...) century forms make no use of "what many philosophers would regard as a strange and perhaps nonexistent kind of causal series" and, according to the author, are more relevant because modern objections, e.g. those of Hume and Russell, aim at the eighteenth century forms. (shrink)