This book, the author tells us, is "about some of the ways in which the techniques of modal logic may be used to study concepts of proof theory first studied in Gödel's famous paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic." Those who, with Quine and others, think that modal logic was conceived in sin, may well doubt that its techniques will throw anything but more Dunkel on proof theory. The author attempts to show otherwise and construes "☐A", where " ☐" is (...) the symbol for modal necessity, in terms of Gödel's arithmetical predicate "Bew" for provability. The formulae in which this latter occurs are perfectly well-defined, we are told, and thus no sin can be attached to this identification. But are such formulae perfectly well-defined? Syntactically, yes; but semantically? It is usually assumed that they are, but the full array of semantical principles needed to carry out Gödel's arithmetization seems never to have been given in full detail. And it is just possible that a fallacy of ambiguity lies concealed in such formulae, as F. Rivetti-Barbò has contended and Lesniewski appears to have hinted at. In any case, not all is happy philosophically and to everyone's satisfaction, at the very foundation of Gödel's method. Although the author purports to have proved here a number of seemingly interesting and sophisticated theorems, the real semantical issues involved seem to have been skirted.--R.M.M. (shrink)

This is a translation of the text as it is found in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, and Stump helpfully includes the column numbers of that edition in her English version of it. She did check the 1570 Glareanus edition and notes some discrepancies between it and the Patrologia text, but her chief concern was to translate, not to edit, in order that a remarkable work might be put into the hands of those for whom Latin is an impediment. The interest of (...) this book is far from being confined to neophytes, however; indeed, for many the principal attraction of the book will lie in Stump’s notes and in her essays which make up part 2. The actual translation takes up only sixty-six pages, so there is a great deal here for the reader to savor, over and above what, on the basis of a few comparisons, I judge to be a faithful and accurate translation. as "offense against the sovereignty of the people or that of extortion by a provincial governor, fall under the judicial genus" does seem a trifle anachronistic. But then one finds "Watergate" in the index.). (shrink)

It is a high merit of this book to emphasize that "philosophy properly speaking is characterized by the kind of logic it employs, for what it employs it assumes, however silently; and what it assumes it presupposes. The logic stands behind the ontology and is, so to speak, metaphysically prior." By "logic" here is meant a species of philosophical logic, concerned in part with "systematic metaphysics" and with "critical ontology." The term "Grand Logic" is due to Peirce, but has been (...) given a more modern reading by George Berry and Hao Wang. Feibleman uses the phrase in the plural to seek out the "common assumptions of the leading western logicians from Aristotle to Quine." However, the only logicians whose work is discussed at any depth are Aristotle, Frege, Whitehead, Russell, and Quine, with only the most casual reference to Ockham, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, De Morgan, Boole, Schröder, Peirce himself, Lesniewski, Carnap, Tarski, and Gödel, all "leading" logicians surely in any suitable list. Also there is total neglect of all recent work in systematic semantics and pragmatics of the very kind that is of the greatest metaphysical relevance. To determine with precision the assumptions common to the work of all of these writers would be a formidable historical as well as analytic task. Nonetheless, the use of modern logic in the detailed formulation of specific metaphysical systems has great promise for the future, as does the criticism of alternative "logics" within the context of specific metaphysical assumptions.--R.M.M. (shrink)

These remarks, which span the last eighteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, extend several of his well known themes from his so-called "later" writings. One such theme, which occurs as a unifying leitmotiv in this work, is that philosophical puzzlement arises from a failure to realize the indefiniteness and complexity of our concepts. Herein it takes the form of the claim that we have not one but several concepts of color. In fact, we have as many concepts of color as we (...) have different methods for determining sameness of color. "The indefiniteness in the concept of color lies, above all, in the indefiniteness of the concept of the sameness of colors, i.e., of the methods of comparing colors". E.g., when I say of two objects that they have the same color I could mean, among other things, that they visually appear to be similar or that their surfaces are painted with similarly tinted paints. Another prominent theme, which runs throughout all of his writings, both early and late, is the employment of a linguistic or grammatical theory of necessity for the purpose of refuting claims to have synthetic a priori knowledge. Herein it is phenomenology which is put in its place, its claims turning out to be only an "analysis of concepts that can neither agree with nor contradict physics". The indefiniteness in our concept of color helps spawn the illusion of such exalted knowledge, because it enables us to use a single sentence, on some occasions, to express a norm or convention of language and, on others, to report experience. "Sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience". Considerable space is devoted to showing that the sentence "A body cannot seem to be both white and transparent" is used in the former way. While Wittgenstein succeeds in saying many interesting and original things about color, his remarks do not give any further clarification to the underlying themes, such as the two above, which he deploys in this area.—R.M.G. (shrink)

A. I. Melden’s earlier writings suggested that the justification for a given moral right is simply the social institution or context in which that right characteristically was involved: "the right that A has is the right that is his moral status or role with respect to B". On this view there is no justification for such rights independent of what can be provided by the particular practices in which they are embedded. Thus, to determine and ultimately to justify the respective (...) moral rights of parents and their children we should look to the "language game" in which they are mutually involved—that of family life—for this is the context in which rights and obligations of this sort have their primary and peculiar place. (shrink)

This volume contains twelve previously published essays, dealing with non-formal modes of inference, with some specifically logical issues, with language and symbolic representation, with Goodman, Chomsky, and Skinner. In the first, "Reasonableness," we are told that "it would be heroic folly to aspire to be reasonable in all situations," and that reasonableness turns out to be "a somewhat humdrum, pedestrian virtue, involving... a problematic calculation of probabilities and expected values in situations of inescapable fallibility." Still, we are happily told that (...) "in a situation in which it is uncertain which action to take, an action is reasonable if there is some sufficient reason to take it, and no better reason to choose one of the alternatives.". (shrink)