Nino Cocchiarella (born 1933), Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University, is best known for his work in formal logic and ontology.
Indiana University Bloomington is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship institution of the Indiana University system and, with over 40,000 students, its largest university.
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
Among his important articles: "Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic , vol. 21 (1980); "Richard Montague and the Logical Analysis of Language", in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 2, Philosophy of Language/Philosophical Logic, G. Fløistad, ed., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague (1981) and "The Development of the Theory of Logical Types and the Notion of a Logical Subject in Russell's Early Philosophy", Synthèse , vol. 45 (1980).
In metaphysics, nominalism is a philosophical view which denies the existence of universals and abstract objects, but affirms the existence of general or abstract terms and predicates. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects – objects that do not exist in space and time.
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside the mind's perception of them. Conceptualism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like immanent realism is.
The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the foundations of mathematics and related fields of mathematical logic, as well as philosophy of mathematics. It was established in 1960 and is published by Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Notre Dame. The editors-in-chief are Michael Detlefsen and Peter Cholak.
His books include Logical Investigations of Predication Theory and the Problem of Universals (1986); Logical Studies in Early Analytic Philosophy (1987); Formal Ontology and Conceptual Realism, New York, Springer, (2007); and Modal Logic. An Introduction to its Syntax and Semantics (with Max Freund), Oxford, Oxford University Press, (2008).
In metaphysics, the problem of universals refers to the question of whether properties exist, and if so, what they are. Properties are qualities or relations that two or more entities have in common. The various kinds of properties, such as qualities and relations, are referred to as universals. For instance, one can imagine three cup holders on a table that have in common the quality of being circular or exemplifying circularity, or two daughters that have in common being the female offsprings of Frank. There are many such properties, such as being human, red, male or female, liquid, big or small, taller than, father of, etc. While philosophers agree that human beings talk and think about properties, they disagree on whether these universals exist in reality or merely in thought and speech.
Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for in reality, their denotation.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century." From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A 2009 poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993 for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning." In 1996 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for his "outstanding contributions to the progress of philosophy in the 20th century by proposing numerous theories based on keen insights in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of language."
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics, and purports to provide a viewpoint of the nature and methodology of mathematics, and to understand the place of mathematics in people's lives. The logical and structural nature of mathematics itself makes this study both broad and unique among its philosophical counterparts.
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language and mathematics. Though largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) introduced his work to later generations of logicians and philosophers.
An ontological commitment refers to a relation between a language and certain objects postulated to be extant by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring to 'legal persons' that are collective entities that have rights. One says the legal doctrine has an ontological commitment to non-singular individuals. In information systems and artificial intelligence, where an ontology refers to a specific vocabulary and a set of explicit assumptions about the meaning and usage of these words, then an ontological commitment is an agreement to use the shared vocabulary in a coherent and consistent manner within a specific context. In philosophy a "theory is ontologically committed to an object only if that object occurs in all the ontologies of that theory"
Alfred Tarski, born Alfred Teitelbaum, was a Polish-American logician and mathematician of Polish-Jewish descent. Educated in Poland at the University of Warsaw, and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and the Warsaw school of mathematics, he immigrated to the United States in 1939 where he became a naturalized citizen in 1945. Tarski taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1942 until his death in 1983.
Analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy that became dominant in the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. The term can refer to one of several things:
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He made contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and aesthetics. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance:
(i) Possible worlds exist.
(ii) Every possible world is a concrete entity.
(iii) Any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world.
(iv) Our world is among the possible worlds.
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, noted for his seminal contributions to philosophy of science.
Early Islamic law placed importance on formulating standards of argument, which gave rise to a "novel approach to logic" in Kalam However, with the rise of the Mu'tazili philosophers, who highly valued Aristotle's Organon, this approach was displaced by the older ideas from Hellenistic philosophy, The works of al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and other Persian Muslim logicians who often criticized and corrected Aristotelian logic and introduced their own forms of logic, also played a central role in the subsequent development of European logic during the Renaissance. The use of Aristotelian logic in Islamic theology again began to decline from the 10th century, with the rise of Ashʿari theology to the intellectual mainstream, which rejects causal reasoning in favour of clerical authority.
Gustav Bergmann was an Austrian-born American philosopher. He studied at the University of Vienna and was a member of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann was influenced by the philosophers Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and Rudolf Carnap who were members of the Circle. In the United States, he was a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Iowa.
Logic is the formal science of using reason and is considered a branch of both philosophy and mathematics. Logic investigates and classifies the structure of statements and arguments, both through the study of formal systems of inference and the study of arguments in natural language. The scope of logic can therefore be very large, ranging from core topics such as the study of fallacies and paradoxes, to specialized analyses of reasoning such as probability, correct reasoning, and arguments involving causality. One of the aims of logic is to identify the correct and incorrect inferences. Logicians study the criteria for the evaluation of arguments.
Joseph Zalman Margolis is an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism.
Following the developments in formal logic with symbolic logic in the late nineteenth century and mathematical logic in the twentieth, topics traditionally treated by logic not being part of formal logic have tended to be termed either philosophy of logic or philosophical logic if no longer simply logic.
This is an index of articles in philosophy of language
Logic is the systematic study of the form of valid inference, and the most general laws of truth. A valid inference is one where there is a specific relation of logical support between the assumptions of the inference and its conclusion. In ordinary discourse, inferences may be signified by words such as therefore, thus, hence, ergo, and so on.
