In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; (...) rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science. (shrink)

The present study starts from the question if there can be any logic of religion. The answer is affirmative for logic in a wide sense. The attempts from the logic of beliefs account for this. However, the study focuses on the specific of the logic of religious terms, a less approached domain by logicians and philosophers. In this line issues like those of the logic of analogy, of the distinctions between the specific, general and total content of terms, between logical (...) distributive and collective conjunctions, etc are brought into discussion. In the end, dogmatic concepts are analyzed, as the core of religious concepts. (shrink)

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

Le concept de redondance logiqu e chez Bolzano soulève plusieurs difficultés. Il ne s?accorde ni avec la notion de représentation simple qu?il est censé expliquer, puisque Bolzano définit les individus comme des unités composées de plusieurs caractères et décrit les représentations singulières (noms propres et indexicaux) comme l?abréviation de descriptions définies, ni avec la distinction entre jugements synthétiques et analytiques, car il sup­pose que l?analyse d?un sujet individuel permet d?en dévoiler un à un les prédicats, comme si l?expérience ne jouait (...) aucun rôle dans la connaissance des individus. Pourquoi Bolzano reste-t-il donc attaché à un concept aussi problématique ? Est-ce le seul moyen d?expliquer comment nous nous repré­sentons des individus ? Nous montrerons que les apories de la notion de redondance logique témoignent de l?influence de la théorie leibnizienne du jugement, et qu?une version phénoménologiquement améliorée de la séman­tique objective est néanmoins capable de les surmonter et de rétablir la simplicité de la représentation et la synthèse du jugement dans leurs droits. (shrink)

The description for this book, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, will be forthcoming.