Consistent Intellectual Thought

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1982

One of the hall-marks of early Greek philosophy is that it commences with an awareness of certain basic aspects of reality. Reflecting on these aspects gave rise to recurrent issues, such as the problem of unity and diversity, the whole and its (cohering) parts as well as constancy and changelater on also captured in the opposition of being and becoming. Parmenides and his school characterized "being" mainly in spatial terms to which a metaphysical connotation is sometimes attached. Zeno, the Eleatic philosopher, best known for his paradoxes directed against multiplicity and motion, actually discovered the spatial whole-parts relation. Anaxagoras explored another significant insight in his claim that everything coheres with everything else. These developments paved the way for Aristotle to stipulate two criteria for continuity still reflected within contemporary set theory. What is noteworthy in this context is that the way in which Aristotle handled the problem of being and becoming caused him to restrict knowledge to conceptual knowledge, i.e., to knowledge constituted by universal features. According to this view of Aristotle what is individual withdraws itself from the grasp of conceptual knowledge. Then attention is given to some implications of the relationship between constancy and change, with particular reference to the nature of constant principles and the varying ways in which they could be applied in unique situations as well as to our awareness of identity. This analysis paves the way for an explanation of some analogical interconnections between different aspects. It also generated some crucial questions to the idea of a logic of change, followed by a concise assessment of the nature of monistic isms, specifically related to the aspects of number and space. In what then follows the distinction between concept and idea (conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge) is illuminated in order to substantiate the ultimate conclusion of the article regarding the four most basic "idea-statements" one can formulate about the universe. This is accomplished by showing that terms derived from number, space, movement and the physical aspects could be employed in a concept-transcending manner, expressed in the following four statements: (i) Everything is unique; (ii) Everything coheres with everything else (iii) Everything remains identical to itself; and (iv) Everything changes.

Trends in Logic, 2018

The book series Trends in Logic covers essentially the same areas as the journal Studia Logica, that is, contemporary formal logic and its applications and relations to other disciplines. The series aims at publishing monographs and thematically coherent volumes dealing with important developments in logic and presenting significant contributions to logical research.

2016

From physics to society∗ Abstract. In Part I of our joint paper [WuB13], we outlined our respective theories, The Basic Theory of the Philosophy of Information (BTPI) and Logic in Reality (LIR) and showed their synergy for the understanding of complex informational processes. In this part, we develop Wu’s fundamen-tal philosophical insight of the origin of the values of information in the interactions of complex information processing. A key concept in our work is that of a logical isomorphism between human individual and social value and the natural laws of the physical world. On the basis of Wu’s concept of Informational Thinking, we propose an Informational Stance, a philosophi-cal stance that is most appropriate for, and not separated nor isolated from, the emerging unified theory of information. We propose our metaphilosophy and metalogic of information as further support for the ethical development of the Information Society.

2020

Synthese, 2017

On his 60th birthday Pascal Engel was presented with a collection of more than fifty 1 1 papers authored by prestigious philosophers that reflected his long career of promotion 2 and development of analytic philosophy in and out of Europe. 1 This special issue brings 3 together a selection of those papers centred on the topics of truth and epistemic norms.

In this essay, I grapple with a stubborn and troubling phenomenon that arises very frequently in philosophical correspondence, philosophical conversation, and especially philosophical debate, alike: fundamental philosophical disagreement.

Principia: an international journal of epistemology

Foreword : Consistency, Contradiction, and Consequence

Ratio 27.3 (2014) 247-261

Modern Logic has generated a lot of problems for itself through inattention to natural forms of speech. In particular it has had difficulties with a large group of ‘logical paradoxes’ through its preoccupation with the Predicate Calculus and related structures to the exclusion of other formal structures that represent natural language more fully, and thereby escape these paradoxes. In natural speech the unrecognized forms involved are principally individual referring terms with a non-specific or fictional reference. For, under the influence of the Logical Empiricists, the focus in formal logic has been on individual terms with a specific, factual reference. But a similar point arises with certain predicates, and indeed even the proper concept of a predicate has been lost, producing the most notorious of the standard puzzles: Russell’s Paradox. The paper inevitably makes reference to contemporary logical symbolism in places, but its purpose is to show that the only way forward is to use a symbolism that is abbreviatory only, i.e. maps directly onto natural speech.