Judging correctly Brentano and the reform of elementary logic正确判断布伦塔诺和初等逻辑的改革.pdfVIP

peter simons 3 Judging correctly: Brentano and the reform of elementary logic In memory of the achievements of Arthur Prior introduction The nineteenth was logic’s breakthrough century. At its beginning, logic had just been claimed by Kant, in justified ignorance of Leib- niz’s unpublished advances, not to have advanced since antiquity, and the laws of logic were soon to be submitted to the indignities of Hegel and to suffer the scorn of Mill. What started anachronisti- cally in the 1820s with Richard Whately as a modest “back [beyond Locke] to Aristotle” movement in Oxford, trying to reinstate scholas- tic ways of doing logic after the long dark centuries since Ramus, in- spired others lacking the desire to turn the clock back to reconsider logic and its role. This gathered momentum, and what began as a revival turned into a reform and then became a palace-storming rev- olution. Bolzano’s obscurely published and tragically ignored 1837 masterpiece Wissenschaftslehre invented modern semantics, while ten years later in 1847 Boole and DeMorgan used mathematical methods and algebraic analogies to propel the study of inference out of the humanities and into mathematics. The twin giants of later nineteenth-century logic, Peirce and Frege, independently made huge strides of innovation: propositional logic, relations, quantifiers all re- ceived rigorous treatment. There were many other considerable logi- cians: Jevons, Venn, Schroder, MacColl, Neville Keynes, and Lewis ¨ Carroll all made notable contributions. By the turn of the twentieth century logic had come further in a hundred years than in the pre- ceding two thousand, and was soon to see its flowering at the hands 45 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 46 p