Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), a Russian theologian, philosopher, and mathematician, argued that the religious discourse is essentially contradictory and put forward the idea of the logical theory of antinomies. Recently his views raised interesting discussions among logicians who consider him a forerunner of many non-classical logics. In this paper I discuss four interpretations of Florensky’s views: paraconsistent, L-contradictory, non-monotonic and rhetorical. In conclusion I argue for the integral interpretation which unites these four approaches.

This article deals with an alternative interpretation of syllogistics, different from the classical one: an intensional one, in which subject and predicate are not associated with a set of individuals but a set of attributes. The authors of the paper draw attention to the fact that this approach was first proposed by Leibniz in works on logical calculus, which for a long time remained in the shadow of his other philosophical works. Currently, the intensional approach is gaining more and more (...) popularity due to the development of non-classical logics, and the article will present several existing intensional formal syllogistic semantics. The paper will also consider another historical approach to syllogistics, associated with the name of the Russian logician Nikolai Vasiliev, who is not only one of the founders of non-classical but also of a different intensional interpretation of such logic. The authors, along with the already known formalizations of Vasiliev’s ideas, present two new systems. One of them is a reconstruction of one type of imaginary logic with statements of three qualities: affirmative and two types of negative statements. The second system is the one that is adequate to semantics, in which instead of the four classical ones, only three types of statements are presented, and their significance is determined through the relation of the classical logical entailment. Both of them are interpreted intensionally. The intensional approach in logic and, in particular, in syllogistics allows us to expand the class of accepted principles. (shrink)

This article presents the story of S. A. Yanovskaya's epiphany—particularly, her shift from hard-line communist orthodoxy and hostility towards ‘bourgeois minded’ Soviet-Russian mathematicians to vigorous support of mathematical logic. In light of this evidence, S. A. Yanovskaya (1896–1966) may be considered as a spiritual leader and administrative founder of modern mathematical research and education in the USSR/russia.