An Introduction to Philosophical Logic

This introduction to topics in philosophical logic provides a comprehensive account of the major issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of language as these are dealt with in contemporary philosophy. Each chapter is a self-contained introduction to the subject which it treats, but the book as a whole constitutes a survey of the views of some of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers : Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Kripke, Davidson, Dummett, and others. The references constitute an extensive bibliography of the relevant philosophical literature, and throughout the book technical terms and concepts are explained and analysed. – 1. Philosophical logic, the philosophy of logic, philosophy and logic (Notes); – 2. The proposition (Notes); – 3. Necessity, analyticity, and the a priori (Notes); – 4. Existence, presuppositions and descriptions (Notes); – 5. Truth : the pragmatic and coherence theories (Notes); – 6. Truth : the correspondence, Redundancy and semantic theories (Notes); – 7. Meaning, reference, verification and use (Notes); – 8. Truth, meaning, realism and antirealism (Notes); – 9. Some consequences and commitments (Notes). M.-M. V.