Richard L Epstein 
Reasoning and Formal Logic 

This series of books presents the fundamentals of logic in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the notes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context.

The basic theme here is the analysis of formal logic in terms of what metaphysical assumptions we need when we develop the formal systems we use. The essays together give a perspective of formal logic as part of the art of reasoning well.

The essays are • Possibilities and Valid Inferences, • A General Framework for Semantics for Propositional Logics, • Why Are There So Many Logics? • Truth and Reasoning, • On Translations, • Reflections on Temporal and Modal Logic, • The Timelessness of Classical Predicate Logic, • Events in the Metaphysics of Predicate Logic, • Categoricity with Minimal Metaphysics, • Reflections on Gödel’s Theorems, • On the Error in Frege’s Proof that Names Denote, and • Postscript: Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well.

Tabella dei contenuti

Possibilities and Valid Inferences
Why Are There So Many Logics?
Truth and Reasoning
On Translations
Reflections on Temporal and Modal Logic
The Timelessness of Classical Predicate Logic
Events in the Metaphysics of Predicate Logic
Categoricity with Minimal Metaphysics
Reflections on Gödel’s Theorems
On the Error in Frege’s Proof that Names Denote
Postscript: Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well
Bibliography
Index of Symbols
Index

Circa l’autore

Richard L Epstein received his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, a Fulbright Fellow to Brazil, and a National Academy of Sciences Scholar to Poland. He is the author of the series of books ‘Essays on Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well’, and the textbooks ‘Critical Thinking’ and ‘The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking’. He is now the Head of the Advanced Reasoning Forum.