Bøger i Synthese Library serien

The present collection of papers derives from a philosophy conference organised in the Sicilian town of M ussomeli in September 1991.

Willard VanOrman Quine has probably been the most influential th American philosopher of the 20 century. He has made major contributions to the fields of logic and set theory, philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at a Seminar on Intensional Logic held at the University of Amsterdam during the period September 1990-May 1991.

Contemporary Action Theory, Volume I (Individual Action) is concerned with topics in philosophical action theory such as reasons and causes of action, intentions, freedom of will and of action, omissions and norms in legal and ethical contexts, as well as activity, passivity and competence from medical points of view.

Stig Kanger (1924-1988) made important contributions to logic and formal philosophy. Kanger's most original achievements were in the areas of general proof theory, the semantics of modal and deontic logic, and the logical analysis of the concept of rights. This title contains critical essays on the various aspects of Kanger's work.

Optic flow provides all the information necessary to guide a walking human or a mobile robot to its target. Over the past 50 years, a body of research on optic flow spanning the disciplines of neurophysiology, psychophysics, experimental psychology, brain imaging and computational modelling has accumulated.

Gertrudis Van de Vijver* Seminar of Logic and Epistemology University of Ghent Before being classified under the fashionable denominators of complexity and chaos, self-organization and autonomy were intensely inquired into in the cybernetic tradition.

This book deals with a basic problem arising within the Bayesian approach 1 to scientific methodology, namely the choice of prior probabilities. In Section 3, the methods used in TIP and BS for making multinomial inference~ are considered and some conceptual relationships between TIP and BS are pointed out.

Papers from the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science

At the turn of the century, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl both participated in the discussion concerning the foundations of logic and mathematics. It shows that Husserl's thought is coming to occupy a central role in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, as well as in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) has often been referred to as one of the most important North American philosophers, but the real extent of his philosophical importance is only now beginning to emerge.

This is the first of two volumes comprising the papers submitted for publication by the invited participants to the Tenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held in Florence, August 1995.

This book gives a state-of-the-art survey of current research in logic and philosophy of science, as viewed by invited speakers selected by the most prestigious international organization in the field.

Talking Wolves advances an analysis of Hobbes which takes language seriously (as seriously as Hobbes took it). It presents a reading of Hobbes's view of society at large, and political society in particular, through a comprehensive discussion based on, and intimately linked to, his philosophy of language.

The emphasis is on theories of meaning and reference for 'J', but a fair amount of space is devoted to 'I' -thoughts and the role of the concept of the self in cognition.

Contemporary Action Theory, Volume I (Individual Action) is concerned with topics in philosophical action theory such as reasons and causes of action, intentions, freedom of will and of action, omissions and norms in legal and ethical contexts, as well as activity, passivity and competence from medical points of view.

Contemporary Action Theory, Volume II (Social Action) is concerned with the philosophical and logical aspects of actions performed by several individuals or groups of individuals. The topics dealt with in this volume include collective attitudes (especially joint intentions), cooperation, social norms, and commitments.

Descartes made a sharp distinction between matter and mind. Is such interaction possible, however, without either a materialist reduction of mind to matter or an idealist (phenomenalist) reduction of matter to mind?

The author describes and criticizes empirically and conceptually unified models of colour naming that relate basic colour terms directly to perceptual and ultimately to physiological facts, arguing that this strategy has overlooked the cognitive dimension of colour naming.

They deal with the four kinds of logic I have been concerned with: formal logic, transcendental logic, speculative logic and hermeneutic logic.

This collection of essays presents a systematic and up-to-date survey of the main aspects of Georg Henrik von Wright's philosophy, tracing the general humanistic leitmotiv to be found in his vast, varied output.

We- as agents (persons, selves, subjects) - make our actions happen. Who -~ or what - is an agent ? And how - in virtue of what - does an agent do things, or refrain from doing them? The first chapter deals with problems in the theory of action that seem to require the assumption that actions are controlled by agents.

This implied that truth (and consequently semantic concepts to which truth appeared to be reducible) proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language.

Many articles and books dealing with Donald Davidson's philosophy are dedicated to the papers and ideas Davidson put forward in the `sixties and `seventies.

Surprisingly, modified versions of the confirmation theory (Carnap and Hempel) and truth approximation theory (Popper) turn out to be smoothly sythesizable.

he present book and its companion volume The Tenseless Theory of Time: a T Critical Examination are an attempt to adjudicate what one recent discussant has called "the most fundamental question in the philosophy of time," namely, "whether a static or a dynamic conception of the world is correct.

Current debate in cognitive science, from robotics to analysis of vision, deals with problems like the perception of form, the structure and formation of mental images and their modelling, the ecological development of artificial intelligence, and cognitive analysis of natural language.

The Scope of the Project The concept of holism is at the centre of far-reaching changes in various areas of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Holism in epistemology and the philosophy of mind is seen as an alternative to what is known as the Cartesian tradition, which dominated modem thought down to logical empiricism.

Although there is an abundance of highly specialized monographs, learned collections and general introductions to the philosophy of science, only a few 25 years.

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve the purpose of approach to the truth.