Formal Logic is an undergraduate text suitable for introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in symbolic logic. The book’s nine chapters offer thorough coverage of truth-functional and quantificational logic, as well as the basics of more advanced topics such as set theory and modal logic. Complex ideas are explained in plain language that doesn’t presuppose any background in logic or mathematics, and derivation strategies are illustrated with numerous examples. Translations, tables, trees, natural deduction, and simple meta-proofs are taught through over 400 exercises. A companion website offers supplemental practice software and tutorial videos.
In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They likewise share the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argue that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is likewise to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality. By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, who explores how language in all its formal aspects actually enables us to engage meaningfully with the world, Eldridge challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations—even the failure—of language in the face of reality. Eldridge provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. Her account of the orienting and engaging capabilities of language reconciles the extraordinarily ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.
The Gernet Centre was founded as a place where the structural method could be applied to the classics. ‘Structuralists’ attribute the survival, origin and function of myths to common crosscultural factors they identify as ‘structures’. As this book, first published as The Structuralists on Myth in 1992 explains, these structures are bundles of information not obvious either to the narrator or to the listener. The bundles are collected features that reveal either the reasons for the survival of myths, or their origins, or their functions within their contexts. The structuralists consider themselves to have talents as the collectors from myths of these bundles of information.
Focusing on the scientific study of communication, this book is a systematic examination. To that end, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are presented and then brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, showing how all four views are interconnected. The question of whether the study of communication can be considered a unique science is addressed. It is argued that communication is never separate from any object of study and thus we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.
First of all, I would like to emphasize that the objective of this book is not to study the universe in a classical or materialistic way, but rather to explain all its most important aspects, but analyzed from a philosophical or metaphysical point of view. It is true that it represents a bold description of the cosmos, but this is better than simply denying all soul in matter as materialistic scientists do when they claim that the origin of all material phenomenon without consciousness is another material phenomenon without consciousness of itself. It is surprising that there are so many universities and physics specialists at present, yet very few wonder what the real reason for their behavior is, or if they are aware of what they are doing. But materialistic scientists who deny the soul to people or matter always evasively answer that question, saying that if matter and its particles react to the stimuli they receive it is because of other, smaller particles, but they always try to avoid it. The true answer, because if matter reacts and acts in this way, it is simply because it is alive, even if it is in a different way from what biologists call life, because it is life, even if it is mineral and not organic. I would also like this book to serve to find a common point of understanding between the most spiritualistic ancient philosophy and the modern materialistic mentality that helps to understand the part of reason that each one has, because it is so unscientific to deny the existence of the spirit or the life of matter as insisting on saying that ancient legends and superstitions are absolute truths. The problem of contemporary society is that it lacks moral leadership, which causes social anarchy, this is due to the fact that religious organizations refuse to adapt to the times for fear that these changes will make them lose their power, because if they accept changes in their fundamental ideas that would show that they are not infallible as they would have us believe. This is arrogant behavior, because they do not want to accept that many of the things in the world are outside of what they believe or understand, simply because when their religions were founded they were not yet known. This attitude causes a separation between science and religion that can only be redirected through moral renewal. In reality, spiritualism begins where materialism ends, therefore, scientists will never be able to understand the intimate reality of matter if they do not accept to analyze it from a spiritual point of view. It must be borne in mind that a society that only relies on the material aspects of life but despises the spiritual ones is like a farmer who tries to make plants grow only with soil but without water, it is evident that in this way it will fail. With this book, I have tried to answer in a single book the main philosophical questions that throughout history have confused humanity, I have also tried to use clear and direct language, so that readers do not have too many difficulties in understand its content. I hope you find it useful.
This volume of the Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner on Ecclesiology and the Franciscan Charism contains some of the most practical of all of Fehlner’s writings. This volume is divided into three parts. In the first, we are treated to Fehlner’s first reflections on ecclesiology in the wake of Vatican II and his own earlier research into Bonaventure’s ecclesiology and Duns Scotus’s teachings on grace and personhood. To Fehlner, these studies, along with his Tractatus de gratia and teaching notes on the mission of the Holy Spirit, all from the 1960s, contain the rationes seminales of the entirety of his later thought. In part two, we find writings mainly from the following two decades on the Conventual Franciscan charism, the ecclesiola, the church in microcosm. Here we can readily discern the radical effects of Fehlner’s encounter with Maximilian Kolbe and this volume’s close affinity with volume six of this series, on St. Maximilian Kolbe. In part three of this volume, comprising essays from the final fifteen years of his life, Fehlner brings his lifetime of prayerful contemplation and research directly to bear upon practical spirituality. In these essays, Fehlner’s spiritual testament, our author presents his Catholic and Franciscan charismatic vision of Christian life.
One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2012, held in Canaterbury, UK, in July 2012. The 16 long papers, 6 short papers and 21 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers are organized in keynotes, tutorial, workshops, graduate student symposium and topical sections on psychological and cognitive issues, diagram layout, diagrams and data analysis, Venn and Euler diagrams, reasoning with diagrams, investigating aesthetics, applications of diagrams.
This is the first volume of a collection of papers in honor of the fiftieth birthday of Jean-Yves Béziau. These 25 papers have been written by internationally distinguished logicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, including Arnon Avron, John Corcoran, Wilfrid Hodges, Laurence Horn, Lloyd Humbertsone, Dale Jacquette, David Makinson, Stephen Read, and Jan Woleński. It is a state-of-the-art source of cutting-edge studies in the new interdisciplinary field of universal logic. The papers touch upon a wide range of topics including combination of logic, non-classical logic, square and other geometrical figures of opposition, categorical logic, set theory, foundation of logic, philosophy and history of logic (Aristotle, Avicenna, Buridan, Schröder, MacColl). This book offers new perspectives and challenges in the study of logic and will be of interest to all students and researchers interested the nature and future of logic.
