Alexander Hieke Livres

Philosophers often have tried to either reduce "disagreeable" objects or concepts to (more) acceptable objects or concepts. Reduction is regarded attractive by those who subscribe to an ideal of ontological parsimony. But the topic is not just restricted to traditional metaphysics or ontology. In the philosophy of mathematics, abstraction principles, such as Hume's principle, have been suggested to support a reconstruction of mathematics by logical means only. In the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, the logical analysis of language has long been regarded as the dominating paradigm, and liberalized projects of logical reconstruction remain to be driving forces of modern philosophy. This volume collects contributions comprising all these topics, including articles by Alexander Bird, Jaakko Hintikka, James Ladyman, Rohit Parikh, Gerhard Schurz, Peter Simons, Crispin Wright, and Edward N. Zalta.

The book discusses contemporary metaphysics of science and deals with the central question which ontology fits best with our knowledge of the world. Two competing positions in todays metaphysics of science are Humeanism and dispositionalism. There are physical and metaphysical arguments to show that orthodox Humeanism is in trouble. The unorthodox metaphysical turn consists in taking the fundamental properties to be relations rather than intrinsic properties. The book spells out in detail what an unorthodox version of Humeanism amounts to and shows that in turning unorthodox Humeanism off ers a competitive metaphysical framework for science without commitment to irreducible causation.

Logik ist nach dem traditionellen Verständnis eine ars iudicandi, eine Kunst, die Gültigkeit von Schlüssen zu prüfen. Damit die formalen Mittel der modernen Logik zu diesem Zweck eingesetzt werden können, müssen erst Formeln an die Stelle von Sätzen treten: umgangssprachliche Schlüsse müssen adäquat formalisiert werden. Die richtige Formel entwickelt ein theoretisches Konzept des Formalisierens und praktisch an-wendbare Adäquatheitskriterien für Formalisierungen. Dabei werden zentrale Fragen der Philosophie der Lo-gik unter dem Gesichtspunkt des Zusammenspiels von Umgangssprache und Formalismus diskutiert. Die aus-führliche und systematische Diskussion von Formalisierungstests bietet eine wichtige Ergänzung zu den traditionellen Logiklehrbüchern.