The Principles Of Logic

The book is a new edition of the 1883 version of Francis Herbert Bradleys Principles of Logic. Though annotations in the main text are minimal, a new introduction by William Moss places the work in context describing its early reception as well as its present-day importance. There can be no doubt that this text is pivotal for our understanding of the thought of the leading British idealist, and therefore of late nineteenth century philosophy in general. The author sketches in great detail his views in a large number of areas within logic, from the nature of universals and inference, to the laws and foundations of probabilities. The account makes use and criticism of the works on logic and related fields of his contemporaries, such as Sigwart, Lotze, Bain, and Venn. In his introduction, William Moss asks a few thought-provoking questions on Bradley's position and image in the tradition of analytic philosophy, focusing on whether indeed the traditionally held view that Bradley comes at the close of a period which is now very much behind us and of little use for philosophical activity today, is justified.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.