With the publication of the present volume, the Handbook of the
History of Logic turns its attention to the rise of modern logic. The
period covered is 1685-1900, with this volume carving out the
territory from Leibniz to Frege. What is striking about this period is
the earliness and persistence of what could be called 'the
mathematical turn in logic'. Virtually every working logician is aware
that, after a centuries-long run, the logic that originated in
antiquity came to be displaced by a new approach with a dominantly
mathematical character. It is, however, a substantial error to suppose
that the mathematization of logic was, in all essentials, Frege's
accomplishment or, if not his alone, a development ensuing from the
second half of the nineteenth century. The mathematical turn in logic,
although given considerable torque by events of the nineteenth
century, can with assurance be dated from the final quarter of the
seventeenth century in the impressively prescient work of Leibniz. It
is true that, in the three hundred year run-up to the Begriffsschrift,
one does not see a smoothly continuous evolution of the mathematical
turn, but the idea that logic is mathematics, albeit perhaps only the
most general part of mathematics, is one that attracted some degree of
support throughout the entire period in question. Still, as Alfred
North Whitehead once noted, the relationship between mathematics and
symbolic logic has been an "uneasy" one, as is the present-day
association of mathematics with computing. Some of this unease has a
philosophical texture. For example, those who equate mathematics and
logic sometimes disagree about the directionality of the purported
identity. Frege and Russell made themselves famous by insisting
(though for different reasons) that logic was the senior partner.
Indeed logicism is the view that mathematics can be re-expressed
without relevant loss in a suitably framed symbolic logic. But for a
number of thinkers who took an algebraic approach to logic, the
dependency relation was reversed, with mathematics in some form
emerging as the senior partner. This was the precursor of the modern
view that, in its four main precincts (set theory, proof theory, model
theory and recursion theory), logic is indeed a branch of pure
mathematics. It would be a mistake to leave the impression that the
mathematization of logic (or the logicization of mathematics) was the
sole concern of the history of logic between 1665 and 1900. There are,
in this long interval, aspects of the modern unfolding of logic that
bear no stamp of the imperial designs of mathematicians, as the
chapters on Kant and Hegcl make clear. Of the two, Hcgel's influence
on logic is arguably the greater, serving as a spur to the unfolding
of an idealist tradition in logic - a development that will be covered
in a further volume, British Logic in the Nineteenth Century.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780444516114
Publisert
2008
Utgiver
Vendor
North Holland
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Antall sider
780
Forfatter