This book explores some of Kit Fine's outstanding contributions to logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, among others. Contributing authors address in-depth issues about truthmaker semantics, counterfactual conditionals, grounding, vagueness, non-classical consequence relations, and arbitrary objects, offering critical reflections and novel research contributions. Each chapter is accompanied by an extensive commentary, in which Kit Fine offers detailed responses to the ideas and themes raised by the contributors. The book includes a brief autobiography and exhaustive list of his publications to this date. This book is of interest to logicians of all stripes and to analytic philosophers more generally.

This book explores some of Kit Fine's outstanding contributions to logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, among others.Contributing authors address in-depth issues about truthmaker semantics, counterfactual conditionals, grounding, vagueness, non-classical consequence relations, and arbitrary objects, offering critical reflections and novel research contributions.Each chapter is accompanied by an extensive commentary, in which Kit Fine offers detailed responses to the ideas and themes raised by the contributors. The book includes a brief autobiography and exhaustive list of his publications to this date. This book is of interest to logicians of all stripes and to analytic philosophers more generally.

"The book is about the problem of vagueness. It begins by discussing some of the existing views on vagueness and then explains why they have not been thought to be satisfactory. It then outlines a new account of vagueness, based upon the general idea that vagueness is a global rather than a local phenomenon.. In other words, the vagueness of an expression or object is not an intrinsic feature of the object or an expression but a matter of how it relates to other objects and expression. The development of this idea leads to a new semantics and logic for vagueness. The semantics and logic are then applied to a number of issues, including the sorites paradox, the transparency of mental states, and personal identity. It is shown that the view allows one to hew to a much more intuitive position on these various issues"--

This book is the first edited collection of papers on the work of one of the most seminal and profound contemporary philosophers. Over the last five decades, Kit Fine has made thought-provoking and innovative contributions to several areas of systematic philosophy, including philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as to a number of topics in philosophical logic. These contributions have helped reshape the agendas of those fields and have given fresh impetus to a number of perennial debates. Fine's work is distinguished by its technical sophistication, philosophical breadth, and independence from current orthodoxy. A blend of sound common-sense combined with a virtuosity in argumentation and constructive thinking is part and parcel of Kit Fine's lasting contributions to current trends in analytic philosophy. Researchers and students in philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science will benefit alike from these critical contributions to Fine's novel theories on meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality, and will come away with a better understanding of the issues within contemporary analytic philosophy with which they deal.

Develops and defends a new metaphysical and logical theory of arbitrary objects that will reinvigorate the philosophy of mathematics.

Propositional quantifiers are quantifiers binding proposition letters, understood as variables. This Element introduces propositional quantifiers and explains why they are especially interesting in the context of propositional modal logics. It surveys the main results on propositionally quantified modal logics which have been obtained in the literature, presents a number of open questions, and provides examples of applications of such logics to philosophical problems.

This book is dedicated to the work of Alasdair Urquhart. The book starts out with an introduction to and an overview of Urquhart’s work, and an autobiographical essay by Urquhart. This introductory section is followed by papers on algebraic logic and lattice theory, papers on the complexity of proofs, and papers on philosophical logic and history of logic. The final section of the book contains a response to the papers by Urquhart. Alasdair Urquhart has made extremely important contributions to a variety of fields in logic. He produced some of the earliest work on the semantics of relevant logic. He provided the undecidability of the logics R (of relevant implication) and E (of relevant entailment), as well as some of their close neighbors. He proved that interpolation fails in some of those systems. Urquhart has done very important work in complexity theory, both about the complexity of proofs in classical and some nonclassical logics. In pure algebra, he has produced a representation theorem for lattices and some rather beautiful duality theorems. In addition, he has done important work in the history of logic, especially on Bertrand Russell, including editing Volume four of Russell’s Collected Papers.

Written as an attempt to make introductory metaphysics accessible and intelligible to an audience of complete beginners, Klempner's book was developed as text for a year-long course of philosophy evening classes at an adult education center. Thus it reads rather more personably and informally than most introductory-level texts. Rather than surveying the works of important philosophers, the book examines 18 basic metaphysical problems using clear, straightforward language and real-life issues and examples, with reference to applicable theorists. Lacks an index. Distributed by Ashgate. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Paris of the year 1900 left two landmarks: the Tour Eiffel, and David Hilbert's celebrated list of twenty-four mathematical problems presented at a conference opening the new century. Kurt Gödel, a logical icon of that time, showed Hilbert's ideal of complete axiomatization of mathematics to be unattainable. The result, of 1931, is called Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Gödel then went on to attack Hilbert's first and second Paris problems, namely Cantor's continuum problem about the type of infinity of the real numbers, and the freedom from contradiction of the theory of real numbers. By 1963, it became clear that Hilbert's first question could not be answered by any known means, half of the credit of this seeming faux pas going to Gödel. The second is a problem still wide open. Gödel worked on it for years, with no definitive results; The best he could offer was a start with the arithmetic of the entire numbers. This book, Gödel's lectures at the famous Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 1941, shows how far he had come with Hilbert's second problem, namely to a theory of computable functionals of finite type and a proof of the consistency of ordinary arithmetic. It offers indispensable reading for logicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists interested in foundational questions. It will form a basis for further investigations into Gödel's vast Nachlass of unpublished notes on how to extend the results of his lectures to the theory of real numbers. The book also gives insights into the conceptual and formal work that is needed for the solution of profound scientific questions, by one of the central figures of 20th century science and philosophy.

Theodore Sider presents a broad new vision of metaphysics centred on the idea of structure. To describe the world well we must use concepts that 'carve at the joints', so that conceptual structure matches reality's structure. This approach illuminates a wide range of topics, such as time, modality, ontology, and the status of metaphysics itself.