At A71/B96–7 Kant explains that singular judgements are ‘special’ because they stand to the general ones as Einheit to Unendlichkeit. The reference to Einheit brings to mind the category of unity and hence raises a spectre of circularity in Kant’s explanation. I aim to remove this spectre by interpreting the Einheit-Unendlichkeit contrast in light of the logical distinctions among universal, particular and singular judgments shared by Kant and his logician predecessors. This interpretation has a further implication for resolving a controversy (...) over the correlation between the logical moments of quantity (universal, particular, singular) and the categorial ones (unity, plurality, totality). (shrink)

In the history of Western philosophy, dialetheism – the view that some sentences are both true and false – has been unpopular. This paper recovers a previously overlooked episode in the history of dialetheism. Specifically, it reconstructs a section of Robert Greville's The Nature of Truth (1640) in order to show that he was a dialetheist. Greville's consideration of the view that evil is a privation led him to endorse the claim that sinful acts are contradictory; they are the subjects (...) of both being and non‐being. The paper also explores responses to Greville from John Wallis and Nathaniel Culverwell. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 864-886, December 2021.

An adequate semantics for generic sentences must stake out positions across a range of contested territory in philosophy and linguistics. For this reason the study of generic sentences is a venue for investigating different frameworks for understanding human rationality as manifested in linguistic phenomena such as quantification, classification of individuals under kinds, defeasible reasoning, and intensionality. Despite the wide variety of semantic theories developed for generic sentences, to date these theories have been almost universally model-theoretic and representational. This essay outlines (...) a range of proof-theoretic analyses for characterizing generics. Particular attention is given to an expressivist proof-theory that can be traced to 1) work on logical syntax that Carnap undertook prior to his turn toward truth-conditional model theory in the late 1930s, and 2) research on sequent calculi and natural deduction systems that originate in work from Gentzen and Prawitz.1. (shrink)

This paper examines Hegel’s accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel’s logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel’s own conception of logic. It is argued that Hegel’s own (...) scientific presentation [Darstellung] of logic relies on a dialectic working through the tradition of formal logic from Aristotle to Leibniz. The positions within the dialectic are most easily brought into focus in terms of the distinction between Aristotelian and Stoic logic, but they can also be seen as internal to Aristotelian logic. The logical tradition can be regarded as presenting a type of reductio ad absurdum, and a science of logic must examine what it was about Aristotle’s original project that brought it to this fate. (shrink)

Kant claims that Aristotles logic as complete, explain the historical and philosophical considerations that commit him to proving the completeness claim and sketch the proof based on materials from his logic corpus. The proof will turn out to be an integral part of Kant’s larger reform of formal logic in response to a foundational crisis facing it.

The principle of excluded middle is more important than is commonly believed for understanding Kant's overall philosophical project. In the article, this principle is examined in the following contexts: kinds of judgments, concepts of opposition, negation, and determination, and apagogic proof. It is first explained how the principle of excluded middle is employed by Kant in distinguishing between the kinds of judgment. Also called the principle of division, it is the principle of disjunctive and apodictic judgments in Kant's famous table (...) of judgments. Next, the Author shows which kind of opposition is related to the principle of the excluded middle. As a merely logical criterion of truth, this principle grounds the logical necessity of a cognition and plays an important role in the use of apagogical proofs. Then Kant's account of logical negation will be investigated briefly. Negative judgment with a negative copula indicates that something is not contained within the sphere of a given concept. This process occurs in accordance with the principle of excluded middle. Finally, an analysis is made of how Kant presents the metaphysical principle of thoroughgoing determination and its differences from the logical principle of excluded middle. (shrink)

Loci personarum, ‘topics for persons’ were used in Latin rhetoric for the description of persons, their external circumstances, physical attributes, or qualities of character. They stood in the way of fusing rhetoric and dialectic, the goal of sixteenth-century ‘humanistic’ logic: the project of a unified theory of invention depends on the exclusion of loci personarum from the domain of dialectic proper. But still they cannot easily be replaced in the class room. Bartholomaeus Keckermann resolved these difficulties: he proposed to abandon (...) the notion that loci personarum could play a role in finding new arguments concerning persons. So they pose no risks for a unified theory of invention, because they can only be used for the exposition of information that we already have. Since loci personarum are concerned with individuals, the knowledge about individuals that is available to us is inescapably circumstantial and contingent, defying the claim of generality or necessity of dialectic made by Keckermann’s sixteenth-century predecessors. However, our thinking about persons is primarily interested in those aspects that we do not share with other members of our species. For Keckermann, persons are therefore logically different from most individuals belonging to other species. (shrink)

1. This paper addresses the development of mutual relations between two sets of ideas in scholastic logic. First, consider the following statements: (1) It is impossible to encounter a chimera.(2)...

This special issue contains three papers on evolutions in logic during the so-called ‘post-medieval’ period. The papers discuss the following topics: traditions of...

This special issue contains three papers on evolutions in logic during the so-called ‘post-medieval’ period (roughly the years 1450–1700). The papers discuss the following topics: (1) traditions of logic in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (2) approaches to validity in medieval and post-medieval logic; and (3) scholastic and humanist interpretations of the prologue to Galen’s Art of Medicine. All papers provide an original contribution to research on post-medieval logic, which to date is still in the early (...) stages. Together they testify to the great diversity of the discourse on logic during the period under consideration, something that has not been sufficiently appreciated in the scholarship. (shrink)

In recent years non-conceptual content theorists have taken Kant as a reference point on account of his notion of intuition (§§ 1-2). The present work aims at exploring several complementary issues intertwined with the notion of non-conceptual content: of these, the first concerns the role of the intuition as an indexical representation (§ 3), whereas the second applies to the presence of a few epistemic features articulated according to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (§ 4). (...) This work intends to dismiss the possibility that intuition may have an autonomous function of de re knowledge in support of an interpretative reading which can be labelled as weak conceptualism. To this end, the exploration will be conducted from a strictly transcendental perspective – i.e., by referring to the so called theory of the “concept of a transcendental object”. (shrink)