In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

There are obvious benefits to be gained from the study of logic: heightened ability to express ideas clearly and concisely, increased skill in defining one's terms, enlarged capacity to formulate arguments rigorously and to analyze them critically. But the greatest benefit, in my judgment, is the recognition that reason can be applied in every aspect of human affairs.

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this book, making it the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Introduction to Logic is a proven textbook that has been honed through the collaborative efforts of many scholars over the last five decades. Its scrupulous attention to detail and precision in exposition and explanation is matched by the greatest accuracy in all associated detail. In addition, it continues to capture student interest through its personalized human setting and current examples. The 14th Edition of Introduction to Logic, written by Copi, Cohen & McMahon, is dedicated to the many thousands of students (...) and their teachers - at hundreds of universities in the United States and around the world - who have used its fundamental methods and techniques of correct reasoning in their everyday lives. (shrink)

The Presocratics were the founding fathers of the Western philosophical tradition, and the first masters of rational thought. This volume provides a comprehensive and precise exposition of their arguments, and offers a rigorous assessment of their contribution to philosophical thought.

John Palmer develops and defends a modal interpretation of Parmenides, according to which he was the first philosopher to distinguish in a rigorous manner the fundamental modalities of necessary being, necessary non-being or impossibility, and non-necessary or contingent being. This book accordingly reconsiders his place in the historical development of Presocratic philosophy in light of this new interpretation. Careful treatment of Parmenides' specification of the ways of inquiry that define his metaphysical and epistemological outlook paves the way for detailed analyses (...) of his arguments demonstrating the temporal and spatial attributes of what is and cannot not be. An appendix presents a Greek text of the fragments of Parmenides' poem with English translation and textual notes. (shrink)

Analyzes the poem "On Nature" by Parmenides, arguing that is actually a philosophical argument disguised as Homer-like mythological journey. Original.

Explaining the Cosmos is a major reinterpretation of Greek scientific thought before Socrates. Focusing on the scientific tradition of philosophy, Daniel Graham argues that Presocratic philosophy is not a mere patchwork of different schools and styles of thought. Rather, there is a discernible and unified Ionian tradition that dominates Presocratic debates. Graham rejects the common interpretation of the early Ionians as "material monists" and also the view of the later Ionians as desperately trying to save scientific philosophy from Parmenides' criticisms. (...) In Graham's view, Parmenides plays a constructive role in shaping the scientific debates of the fifth century BC. Accordingly, the history of Presocratic philosophy can be seen not as a series of dialectical failures, but rather as a series of theoretical advances that led to empirical discoveries. Indeed, the Ionian tradition can be seen as the origin of the scientific conception of the world that we still hold today. (shrink)

A leading scholar in the psychology of thinking and reasoning argues that the counterfactual imagination—the creation of "if only" alternatives to ...

There is a tradition according to which Parmenides of Elea endorsed the following set of counterintuitive doctrines: (a) There exists exactly one material thing. (b) What exists does not change. (g) Nothing is generated or destroyed. (d) What exists is undivided. For convenience, I will use the label ‘Eleatic monism’ to refer to the conjunction of a–d.

Michael V. Wedin presents a rigorous reconstruction of the deductions in Parmenides' Way of Truth: the most important philosophical treatise before Plato and Aristotle. He answers criticisms which claim that Parmenides' arguments are shot through with logical fallacies, and argues against natural explanations of Parmenides in the Ionian tradition.

The aim of this paper is to investigate two related aspects of human reasoning, and use the results to construct an automated theorem prover for the predicate calculus that at least approximately models human reasoning. The result is a non-resolution theorem prover that does not use Skolemization. It involves two central ideas. One is the interest constraints that are of central importance in guiding human reasoning. The other is the notion of suppositional reasoning, wherein one makes a supposition, draws inferences (...) that depend upon that supposition, and then infers a conclusion that does not depend upon it. Suppositional reasoning is involved in the use of conditionals and reductio ad absurdum, and is central to human reasoning with quantifiers. The resulting theorem prover turns out to be surprisingly efficient, beating most resolution theorem provers on some hard problems. (shrink)

In his great poem, Parmenides uses an argument by elimination to select the correct "way of inquiry" from a pool of two, the ways of is and of is not , joined later by a third, "mixed" way of is and is not . Parmenides' first two ways are soon given modal upgrades - is becomes cannot not be , and is not becomes necessarily is not (B2, 3-6) - and these are no longer contradictories of one another. And is (...) the common view right, that Parmenides rejects the "mixed" way because it is a contradiction? I argue that the modal upgrades are the product of an illicit modal shift. This same shift, built into two Exclusion Arguments, gives Parmenides a novel argument to show that the "mixed" way fails. Given the independent failure of the way of is not , Parmenides' argument by elimination is complete. (shrink)

Dans cette etude magistrale publiee en 1969, Arpad Szabo, specialiste hongrois de philologie et de science hellenique, soumet la terminologie euclidienne a un examen historique visant a faire ressortir le rapport entre la logique des Eleates et la naissance des mathematiques grecques. L'analyse linguistique d'un passage meconnu du Theetete permet de proposer une interpretation originale de la genese du concept mathematique de dynamis, et d'etablir que les definitions, axiomes et postulats presentes dans les Elements d'Euclide ou dans le Theetete de (...) Platon proviendraient de theories elaborees au Ve siecle par les Pythagoriciens en opposition aux Eleates. Les expressions techniques employees par les Grecs dans la theorie des proportions geometriques auraient d'ailleurs ete forgees a partir de considerations pythagoriciennes sur la theorie de la musique. Arpad Szabo a approfondi son etude de la formalisation des mathematiques et de la methode deductive dans L'aube des mathematiques grecques ainsi que dans Les debuts de l'astronomie, de la geographie et de la trigonometrie chez les Grecs (en collaboration avec Erkka Maula). (shrink)