Hannes Leitgeb

Alexander Hieke

Philosophers often have tried to either reduce "disagreeable" objects or concepts to (more) acceptable objects or concepts. Reduction is regarded attractive by those who subscribe to an ideal of ontological parsimony. But the topic is not just restricted to traditional metaphysics or ontology. In the philosophy of mathematics, abstraction principles, such as Hume's principle, have been suggested to support a reconstruction of mathematics by logical means only. In the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, the logical analysis of language has long been regarded to be the dominating paradigm, and liberalized projects of logical reconstruction remain to be driving forces of modern philosophy. This volume collects contributions comprising all those topics, including articles by Alexander Bird, Jaakko Hintikka, James Ladyman, Rohit Parikh, Gerhard Schurz, Peter Simons, Crispin Wright and Edward N. Zalta.

Proceedings of the 31th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2008

Reduction - Abstraction - Analysis

Edgar Morscher

Free logic - i.e., logic free of existential presuppositions in general and with respect to singular terms in particular- began to come into its own as a field of research in the 1950s. As is the case with so many developments in Western philosophy, its roots can be traced back to ancient Greek philo sophy. It is only during the last fifty years, however, that it has become well established as a branch of modern logic. The name of Karel Lambert is most closely connected with this development: he gave it its name and its profile as a well defined field of research. After a development of fifty years, it is time to look back and take stock while at the same time scanning for new perspectives. This is the purpose of the papers collected in this volume. The first paper is written by Karel Lambert himself who also comments on all the papers of the other authors. In an introductory essay we give a survey of the present status of and new directions in free logic.

Alexander Hieke

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