Few moral arguments have been made against vegetarian diets. One exception is the “Logic of the Larder:” We do animals a favor by purchasing their meat, eggs, and milk, for if we did not purchase these products, fewer animals would exist. This argument fails because many farm animals have lives that are probably not worth living, while others prevent a significant number of wild animals from existing. Even if this were not so, the purchase of animal products uses (...) resources that could otherwise be used to bring a much greater number of animals into existence. (shrink)

The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division over (...) the years know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

This first volume of the Logic of the Future edition collects Peirce's writings on the historical development, theory and application of his graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. Its 28 selections of texts and extensive general and volume int.

In recent years, several remarkable results have shown that certain theorems of finite combinatorics are unprovable in certain logical systems. These developments have been instrumental in stimulating research in both areas, with the interface between logic and combinatorics being especially important because of its relation to crucial issues in the foundations of mathematics which were raised by the work of Kurt Godel. Because of the diversity of the lines of research that have begun to shed light on these issues, (...) there was a need for a comprehensive overview which would tie the lines together. This volume fills that need by presenting a balanced mixture of high quality expository and research articles that were presented at the August 1985 AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference, held at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.With an introductory survey to put the works into an appropriate context, the collection consists of papers dealing with various aspects of 'unprovable theorems and fast-growing functions'. Among the topics addressed are: ordinal notations, the dynamical systems approach to Ramsey theory, Hindman's finite sums theorem and related ultrafilters, well quasiordering theory, uncountable combinatorics, nonstandard models of set theory, and a length-of-proof analysis of Godel's incompleteness theorem. Many of the articles bring the reader to the frontiers of research in this area, and most assume familiarity with combinatorics and/or mathematical logic only at the senior undergraduate or first-year graduate level. (shrink)

Intense or industrial animal husbandry is morally bad. This consensus in animal ethics led to the emergence of veganism which is recently in decline in favour of ‘conscientious carnivorism’ which advocates eating animal products from animal-friendly animal husbandry in response to the moral problems of industrial farming. Advocates of animal-friendly husbandry justify rearing and killing ‘happy animals’ by highlighting that the animals live pleasant lives and would not have existed if not reared for human consumption. In this paper, I tackle (...) this ‘logic of the larder’ by showing that it serves as a purification strategy to conceal the harm that animals experience in this alleged animal-friendly type of farming. Defenders of ‘happy meat’ claim that animal-friendly animal husbandry is in the animals’ best interests and that it is in effect a ‘win-win situation’ for humans and farm animals alike. Departing from two critics of animal-friendly animal husbandry, I will show that the problem of this logic is that it evades the fact that moral residuals, which is the experienced harm by the animals, remain by engaging in this practice. Even if there may be strong reasons for the consumption of meat and derivatives of ‘happy animals’, the experienced harm for the animals will not be extinguished. I will denote the detachment that derives from the strategy of rendering the animals’ experienced harm in animal-friendly animal husbandry invisible as guilt. I will conclude that instead of purifying eating animals the ‘good way’, we should face the responsibility we have when killing ‘happy animals’ for ‘happy meat’. (shrink)

Roughly, the problem of the Trinity is the problem of how God can be one and yet be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which are three, not one. That one thing is identical with three distinct things seems to violate traditional laws of identity. I propose a solution to this problem according to which it is just an ordinary claim of one-many identity. For example, one pair of shoes is identical with two shoes; and my one body (...) is identical with its six limbs of arms, legs, head, and torso. The pair of shoes is not identical with each one of the two shoes, nor is my body identical with each one of its six limbs, but rather identical with all of them taken together, or collectively. I argue that the problem of the Trinity should be understood accordingly: God is identical with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit collectively, but not with each one of them distributively. According to the way I develop this proposal, no traditional laws of identity are violated, but merely generalized in an intuitive way. I argue that this is compatible with Christian Orthodoxy as given by the Athanasian Creed. I end by responding to some anticipated objections. (shrink)

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant (...) conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)

I read Stefan Collini’s What are Universities For? last week with very mixed feelings. In the past, I’ve much admired his polemical essays on the REF, “impact”, the Browne Report, etc. in the London Review of Books and elsewhere: they speak to my heart. If you don’t know those essays, you can get some of their flavour from his latest article in the Guardian yesterday. But I found the book a disappointment. Perhaps the trouble is that Collini is too decent, (...) too high-minded, has too unrealistically exalted a view about what actually happens in universities which is too coloured by attitudes appropriate to the traditional humanities. And he is optimistic to the point of fantasy if he thinks that people are so susceptible to “the romance of ideas and the power of beauty” that they will want, or can be brought to want, lots and lots of universities in order to promote the ideas (as if they would suppose that the task of “conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific, and artistic heritage of mankind” was clearly ill-served when there were only forty universities in England, as opposed to a hundred and whatever). (shrink)

The Joint International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is a major forum for presentations of research, applications, and implementations in this important area of computer science. Logic programming is one of the most promising steps toward declarative programming and forms the theoretical basis of the programming language Prolog and its various extensions. Logic programming is also fundamental to work in artificial intelligence, where it has been used for nonmonotonic and commonsense (...) reasoning, expert systems implementation, deductive databases, and applications such as computer-aided manufacturing. Krzysztof R. Apt is project leader at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and part-time Professor in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam. Topics covered: Theory Foundations. Programming Languages. Implementation. Programming Methodologies and Tools. Applications. Deductive Databases. Artificial Intelligence. Parallelism. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and (...) different approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The First International Workshop brings together researchers from the theoretical ends of the logic programming and artificial intelligence communities to discuss their mutual interests. Logic programming deals with the use of models of mathematical logic as a way of programming computers, where theoretical AI deals with abstract issues in modeling and representing human knowledge and beliefs. One common ground is nonmonotonic reasoning, a family of logics that includes room for the kinds of variations that can be found (...) in human reasoning. Topics covered: Stable Semantics. Default Logic. AutoEpistemic Logic. Truth Maintenance Systems. Implementation Issues. Diagnosis. Applications. Inheritance Reasoning. Logics of Belief. Inconsistency and Non-Monotonicity. (shrink)

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents (...) the state of the art in the area. (shrink)