John P . Burgess : Philosophical Logic

Modal Logic in the Modal Sense of Modality

One reason is explained why the pursuit of modal logic’s original aim of evaluating the formal validity of arguments turning on necessity and possibility in a ‘metaphysical’ sense must cross borders and draw the logician into ‘metaphilosophy’. John P. Burgess Department of Philosophy Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1006, USA [email protected]

Review of Subsystems of Second Order Arithmetic by Stephen G . Simpson

It is the norm rather than the exception for a field within mathematics that originated with certain kinds of applications in mind to steer or drift away from them in its subsequent development, as specialists become interested in other applications, or connections with core mathematics, or pure theory. Though mathematical logic has never quite won acceptance in mathematics departments as a nor...

Moral dilemmas and nonmonotonic logic

Burgess on Plural Logic and Set Theory

John Burgess (Burgess, 2004) combines plural logic and a new version of the idea of limitation of size to give an elegant motivation of the axioms of ZFC set theory. His proposal is meant to improve on earlier work by Paul Bernays in two ways. I argue that both attempted improvements fail. John Burgess (Burgess, 2004) combines plural logic and a new version of the idea of limitation of size to ...

Philosophy in John Gardner’s Grendel

John Gardner’s Grendel is a celebrated example of the ontological postmodernist fiction. Along with a discovery of self with which Grendel the narrator of the novel is concerned, grand narratives such as philosophy are questioned. Grendel denies the external objective reality and generously allows the legitimacy of fantastic and non-realistic methods by using “life-affirming fabulous art” as it...