§0. Alonzo Church's contributions to philosophy and to that most philosophical part of logic, intensional logic, are impressive indeed. He wrote relatively few papers actually devoted to specifically philosophical issues, as distinguished from related technical work in logic. Many of his contributions appear in reviews for The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and it can hardly be maintained that one finds there a “philosophical system”. But there occur a clearly articulated and powerful methodology, terse arguments, often of “crushing cogency”, and philosophical (...) observations of the first importance.Many of the less formal philosophical contributions center around questions concerning meaning, but there are important clarifications and insights into matters of the epistemology and ontology of the sciences, especially the formal sciences.1.1. The logistic method. Church's writings on philosophical matters exhibit an unwavering commitment to what he called the “logistic method”. The term did not catch on and now one would just speak of “formalization”. The use of these ideas is now so common and familiar among logicians and logically-oriented philosophers that they are simply taken for granted. But they deserve to be celebrated and re-emphasized, for there are philosophers who seriously underestimate and even consciously reject these techniques. (shrink)

The book is about logical analysis of natural language. Since we humans communicate by means of natural language, we need a tool that helps us to understand in a precise manner how the logical and formal mechanisms of natural language work. Moreover, in the age of computers, we need to communicate both with and through computers as well. Transparent Intensional Logic is a tool that is helpful in making our communication and reasoning smooth and precise. It deals with all kinds (...) of linguistic context in a fully compositional and anti-contextual way. (shrink)

The vision informing 20th Century philosophy has been aptly described as one of a desert landscape. Philosophers behave as if in expectation of an ontological tax collector to whom they will owe the less the fewer entities they declare. The metaphysical purge is perpetrated under a banner emblazoned with Occam’s Razor. But Occam never counselled ontological genocide at all cost. He only cautioned against multiplying entities beyond necessity His Razor is thus in full harmony with the complementary principle, known as (...) Menger’s Comb, which cautions against trying to do with less what requires more. The two methodological precepts are just two sides of the same coin. (shrink)

The boundary between analytic and synthetic sentences is well definable. Quine’s attempt to make it vague is based on a misunderstanding: instead of freeing semantics from shortcomings found, e.g. in Carnap’s work, Quine actually rejects semantics of natural language and replaces it by behavioristically articulated pragmatics. Semantics of natural language as a logical analysis is however possible and it can justify hard and fast lines between analyticity and syntheticity.