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Though with considerable delay, most of the writings of Polish logicians of the inter-war period are now available in English. This is not yet true of Polish philosophy. In the present volume English-speaking readers will fmd, for the first time, a sizeable collection of the articles of one of the most original and distinguished of Poland's philosophers of the present century, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890-1963). To be sure, Ajdukiewicz was a philosopher-logician from the beginning of his career. His first work of some importance, a monograph entitled From the Methodology of the Deductive Sciences (1921 post-dated; two abstracts published in 1919/20) exhibited two features which were to become charac teristic of the style of his later philosophy: On the one hand the monograph was the result of Ajdukiewicz's deep interest in the systems of modern logic, the foundations of mathematics, in the properties of deductive systems and their relevance to philosophy; on the other hand the monograph was an attempt at developing an 'understanding methodology' (in the sense of Gennan 'Verstehende Methodologie') of deductive sciences, i. e. a pragmatic study of axiomatic systems which would supplement purely formal investiga tions of those systems. The fonner made him a close ally oflogical empiricists; the latter was rooted in the henneneutic tradition of the second half of the 19th century (Dilthey) which spilled over into the 20th century (Spranger) and which was not cherished at all by logical empiricists.
This is a collection of new investigations and discoveries on the history of a great tradition, the Lvov-Warsaw School of logic and mathematics, by the best specialists from all over the world. The papers range from historical considerations to new philosophical, logical and mathematical developments of this impressive School, including applications to Computer Science, Mathematics, Metalogic, Scientific and Analytic Philosophy, Theory of Models and Linguistics.
This book presents Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz's philosophy. Ajdukiewicz was one of the most distinguished and important philosophers of the contemporary Poland. He produced important ideas in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ontology. He influenced Polish analytic philosophy very much. The collection gives a general account of Ajdukiewicz philosophy and it is the only full presentation of his ideas available in Western languages. The volume is of interest for everybody working in analytic philosophy.
This study looks to the work of Tarski's mentors Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and reconsiders all of the major issues in Tarski scholarship in light of the conception of Intuitionistic Formalism developed: semantics, truth, paradox, logical consequence.
Science, Reality, and Language criticizes the anti-realist stance currently flourishing in philosophy of science and shows that many contemporary philosophers of science, although they define themselves empiricists, have evolved into "linguistic idealists." After emphasizing that most practicing scientists find the linguistically oriented philosophy of science useless, the author concludes is that a naturalistic philosophy of science is needed in which language is no longer taken to be the whole of reality, but just a human product created for practical and social purposes.
Modern logic has Wldergone some remarkable developments in the last hun dred years. These have contributed to the extraordinary use of formal logic which has become essentially the concern of mathematicians. This has led to attempts to identify logic with formal logic. The claim has even been made that all non-formal reasoning, to the extent that it cannot be formalized, no longer belongs to logic. This conception leads to a genuine impoverishment of logic as well as to a narrow conception of reason. It means that as soon as demonstrative proofs are no longer available reason will no longer dominate. Even the idea of the 'reasonable' becomes foreign to logic and such expres sions as 'reasonable decisions', 'reasonable choice' or 'reasonable hypotheses' would be put aside as meaningless. The domain of action, including method ology and everything that is given over to deliberation or controversy - i.e., foreign to formal logic - would become a battleground where necessarily the reason of the strongest would always prevail.
This collection contains studies on justice, juridical reasoning and argumenta tion which contributed to my ideas on the new rhetoric. My reflections on justice, from 1944 to the present day, have given rise to various studies. The ftrst of these was published in English as The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963). The others, of which several are out of print or have never previously been published, are reunited in the present volume. As justice is, for me, the prime example of a "confused notion", of a notion which, like many philosophical concepts, cannot be reduced to clarity without being distorted, one cannot treat it without recourse to the methods of reasoning analyzed by the new rhetoric. In actuality, these methods have long been put into practice by jurists. Legal reasoning is fertile ground for the study of argumentation: it is to the new rhetoric what mathematics is to formal logic and to the theory of demonstrative proof. It is important, then, that philosophers should not limit their methodologi cal studies to mathematics and the natural sciences. They must not neglect law in the search for practical reason. I hope that these essays lead to be a better understanding of how law can enrich philosophical thought. CH. P.
Simple seeing. Plain talking. Language in use and persons in action. These are among the themes of Virgil Aldrich's writings, from the 1930's onward. Throughout these years, he has been an explorer of conceptual geography: not as a foreign visitor studying an alien land, but close up 'in the language in which we live, move, and have our being'. This is his work. It is clear to those who know him best that he also has fun at it. Yet, in the terms of his oft-cited distinction, it is equally clear that he is to be counted not among the funsters of philosophy, but among its most committed workers. Funsters are those who attempt to do epistemology, metaphysics, or analysis by appealing to examples which are purely imaginary, totally fictional, as unrealistic as you like, 'completely unheard of'. Such imaginative wilfullness takes philosophers away from, not nearer to, 'the rough ground' (Wittgenstein) where our concepts have their origin and working place. In the funsters' imagined, 'barely possible' (but actually impossible) world, simple seeing becomes transformed into the sensing of sense-data; plain talk is rejected as imprecise, vague, and misleading; and per sons in action show up as ensouled physical objects in motion. Then the fly is in the bottle, buzzing out its tedious tunes: the problem of perception of the external world; the problem of meaning and what it is; the mind-body problem. Image-mongering has got the best of image-management.
This book grew out of a graduate student paper [261] in which I set down some criticisms of J. R. Lucas' attempt to refute mechanism by means of G6del's theorem. I had made several such abortive attempts myself and had become familiar with their pitfalls, and especially with the double edged nature of incompleteness arguments. My original idea was to model the refutation of mechanism on the almost universally accepted G6delian refutation of Hilbert's formalism, but I kept getting stuck on questions of mathematical philosophy which I found myself having to beg. A thorough study of the foundational works of Hilbert and Bernays finally convinced me that I had all too naively and uncritically bought this refutation of formalism. I did indeed discover points of surprisingly close contact between formalism and mechanism, but also that it was possible to under mine certain strong arguments against these positions precisely by invok ing G6del's and related work. I also began to realize that the Church Turing thesis itself is the principal bastion protecting mechanism, and that G6del's work was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to both mechanism and formalism. I pushed these lines of argument in my dis sertation with the patient help of my readers, Raymond Nelson and Howard Stein. I would especially like to thank the latter for many valuable criticisms of my dissertation as well as some helpful suggestions for reor ganizing it in the direction of the present book.