First published in 1903, _Principles of Mathematics_ was Bertrand Russell’s first major work in print. It was this title which saw him begin his ascent towards eminence. In this groundbreaking and important work, Bertrand Russell argues that mathematics and logic are, in fact, identical and what is commonly called mathematics is simply later deductions from logical premises. Highly influential and engaging, this important work led to Russell’s dominance of analytical logic on western philosophy in the twentieth century.

There is a standard view of relations, held by philosophers and logicians alike, according to which we may meaningfully talk of a relation holding of several objects in a given order. Thus it is supposed that we may meaningfully—indeed, correctly—talk of the relation loves holding of Anthony and Cleopatra or of the relation between holding of New York, Washington, and Boston. But innocuous as this view might appear to be, it cannot be accepted as applying to all relations whatever. For (...) there is an important class of metaphysical and linguistic contexts which call for an alternative conception of relation, one for which the order of the relata plays no role and in which the application of the relation to its relata is achieved by other means. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that Newtonian forces are real, symmetrical and non-causal relations. First, I argue that Newtonian forces are real; second, that they are relations; third, that they are symmetrical relations; fourth, that they are not species of causation. The overall picture is anti-Humean to the extent that it defends the existence of forces as external relations irreducible to spatio-temporal ones, but is still compatible with Humean approaches to causation (and others) since it denies that forces are a (...) species of causation. (shrink)

The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. N.B. Prof Williamson is now based at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

The objective of this paper is to refute the widely held view that in the wake of his so-called reistic turn Brentano subjected his notion of intentionality to a deep-going revision, viz., that he turned from an ontological account of the intentional object by way of identifying it with the thought-of-thing, i.e., the intentional correlate, or by way of attributing to it a peculiar sort of existence, to a non-ontological account thereof. It will be shown that neither the pre-reistic Brentano (...) espoused anything of an ontological account of the intentional object in that he both distinguished it sharply from the intentional correlate and definitely rejected the idea of there being different sorts of existence, and it will be argued that the apparently ineradicable inclination to ascribe to the pre-reistic Brentano an ontological account of the intentional object stems from ignoring the Aristotelian background of Brentano's thinking about relations. (shrink)

Franz Brentano’s impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The “sharp dialectician” (Freud) and “genial master” (Husserl) influenced philosophers of various allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the “grandfather of phenomenology” (Ryle) but also as an analytic philosopher “in the best sense of this term” (Chisholm). The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano’s philosophy: consciousness (sect.1), intentionality (sect. 2) and ontology and metaphysics (sect. (...) 3). Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philoso¬phy: in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano’s unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5. This section also presents an edition of a manuscript from 1899 on relations, along with the letters from Brentano to Marty which discuss this manuscript. The last part of section 5 contains the text of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference. (shrink)

In Aristotle on the Category of Relation, Pamela Hood challenges the view that Aristotle's conception of relation is so divergent from our own that it does not count as a theory of relation at all. This book presents compelling evidence that Aristotle's theory of relation is more robust than originally suspected.

The point of departure for Anton Marty's theory of intentionality is Franz Brentano's ontology of intentionality as outlined in the unpublished manuscript of his logic-lectures from the second half of the 1880's. This rich ontology comprises immanent objects, immanent propositional contents and states of affairs. The late Marty rejects all immanent entities in Brentano's sense and explains intentionality in terms of counterfactualconditionals.However,contraryto the late Brentano,he insists on the indispensability of the category of states of affairs. Consequently Marty can formulate a (...) realistic theory of truth, while Brentano holds an epistemic theory of truth. (shrink)

In his doctoral dissertation Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles Brentano tried to show that (against criticism of this) one could indeed give a principle defense of Aristotle's table of categories as a coherent system. In later texts Brentano appears sharply critical of Aristotle, mainly in respect to Aristotle's mereology, or theory of part and whole, and to his theory of substance and accident. It is argued that Brentano hadn't observed that Aristotle's belief that there are as many (...) predicative senses of 'be' as there are categories of being is based not on his mereology but on his theory of definition. Overlooking this Brentano was led to far reaching inadequate ontological consequences. (shrink)