Thomas McKay is an American philosopher currently professor of philosophy and director of graduate studies at the department of philosophy of Syracuse University. He was chairman of the department there from 1995 to 2002. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1969, his M.A. from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1972, and his Ph.D., also from the University of Massachusetts, 1974, for a dissertation on "Essentialism and Quantified Modal Logic: Quine's Argument and Kripke's Semantics"
His work has primarily concerned the philosophy of logic and language. In 2006, Oxford University Press published his book, Plural Predicates a, in which he gives an account of a semantics for a plural logic. In particular he develops a Russellian account of plural definite descriptions.
He is also the author of the following textbooks:
Modern Formal Logic (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, Thomson, 2006),
Reasons, Explanations and Decisions (Wadsworth, 2000)
and the following journal articles:
"Essentialism in Quantified Modal Logic," Journal of Philosophical Logic 4 (1975), 423–438.
"Counterfactuals with Disjunctive Antecedents," with Peter van Inwagen, Philosophical Studies 31 (1977), 353–356.
"The Principle of Predication," Journal of Philosophical Logic 7 (1978), 19–26.
"Natural Kind Terms and Standards of Membership," with Cindy Stern, Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (1979), 27–34.
"Lowe and Baldwin on Modalities," Mind 95 (1986), 499–505.
"he himself: Undiscovering an Anaphor," Linguistic Inquiry 22 (1991), 368–373.
"Representing de re Beliefs," Linguistics and Philosophy 14 (1991), 711–739.
"Analogy and Argument," Teaching Philosophy, 20 (1997), 49–60.
"A reconsideration of an argument against compatibilism," Philosophical Topics, 24 (1996), 113–121. (Actually published in late 1997.)
He also wrote the encyclopedia chapters on "Modal Logic, Philosophical Issues," for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and "Propositional Attitude Reports," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2000, 2005. (2005 version co-authored with Michael Nelson), and many book chapters and other presentations.
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, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.
Saul Aaron Kripke was an American analytic philosopher and logician. He was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Kripke is considered one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, he has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory.
Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical logic in a wider sense as the study of the scope and nature of logic in general. In this sense, philosophical logic can be seen as identical to the philosophy of logic, which includes additional topics like how to define logic or a discussion of the fundamental concepts of logic. The current article treats philosophical logic in the narrow sense, in which it forms one field of inquiry within the philosophy of logic.
George Stephen Boolos was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ruth Barcan Marcus was an American academic philosopher and logician best known for her work in modal and philosophical logic. She developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic and in so doing introduced the schema or principle known as the Barcan formula. Marcus, who originally published as Ruth C. Barcan, was, as Don Garrett notes "one of the twentieth century's most important and influential philosopher-logicians". Timothy Williamson, in a 2008 celebration of Marcus' long career, states that many of her "main ideas are not just original, and clever, and beautiful, and fascinating, and influential, and way ahead of their time, but actually – I believe – true".
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent or organism toward a proposition.
In mathematics and logic, plural quantification is the theory that an individual variable x may take on plural, as well as singular, values. As well as substituting individual objects such as Alice, the number 1, the tallest building in London etc. for x, we may substitute both Alice and Bob, or all the numbers between 0 and 10, or all the buildings in London over 20 stories.
In mathematics and logic, a higher-order logic is a form of predicate logic that is distinguished from first-order logic by additional quantifiers and, sometimes, stronger semantics. Higher-order logics with their standard semantics are more expressive, but their model-theoretic properties are less well-behaved than those of first-order logic.
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that they are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that they are not.
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician.
A predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence. For the simple sentence "John [is yellow]", John acts as the subject, and is yellow acts as the predicate, a subsequent description of the subject headed with a verb.
Logic is the formal science of using reason and is considered a branch of both philosophy and mathematics and to a lesser extent computer science. 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.
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Philosophy of logic is the area of philosophy that studies the scope and nature of logic. It investigates the philosophical problems raised by logic, such as the presuppositions often implicitly at work in theories of logic and in their application. This involves questions about how logic is to be defined and how different logical systems are connected to each other. It includes the study of the nature of the fundamental concepts used by logic and the relation of logic to other disciplines. According to a common characterization, philosophical logic is the part of the philosophy of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. But other theorists draw the distinction between the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic differently or not at all. Metalogic is closely related to the philosophy of logic as the discipline investigating the properties of formal logical systems, like consistency and completeness.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It studies how conclusions follow from premises due to the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. It examines arguments expressed in natural language while formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.
Anil K. Gupta is an Indian-American philosopher who works primarily in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Gupta is the Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.
Friederike Moltmann is a linguist and philosopher. She has done pioneering work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics, especially on the interface between metaphysics and natural language semantics, but also on the interface between philosophy of mind and mathematics. She is an important proponent of natural language ontology. She is currently Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.
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