Propositions: Ontology and Logic

by Robert Stalnaker

Overview

In the third volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, distinguished philosopher Robert Stalnaker here offers a defense of an ontology of propositions, and of some logical resources for representing them. He offers an austere formulation of a theory of propositions in a first-order extensional logic, but then uses the commitments of this theory to justify an enrichment to modal logic as an appropriate framework for regimented languages that are constructed to represent any of our scientific and philosophical commitments. His book adopts a self-consciously neo-Quinean methodology, and argues that the theory that is developed helps to motivate and clarify Quine's naturalistic metaphysical picture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197647035
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/20/2022
Series:	RUTGERS LECTURES IN PHILOSOPHY SERIES
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.84(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Robert Stalnaker received his PhD from Princeton in 1965, and taught over the next fifty years at Yale, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell and MIT. He is the author of four books: Inquiry (1984), Our Knowledge of the Internal World (2007), Mere Possibilities (2012), and Context (2015). He has also published three collections of papers, all with Oxford: Context and Content (1999), Ways a World Might Be (2003), and Knowledge and Conditionals (2019). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter I. The Quinean legacy

Chapter II. Propositions

Chapter III. Predicates and predication

Chapter IV. First-order modal logic, and a first-order theory of propositions

Chapter V. Properties and relations

Chapter VI. Possible worlds and possible individuals

References

Editorial Reviews

"His book adopts a self-consciously neo-Quinean methodology, and argues that the theory that is developed helps to motivate and clarify Quine's naturalistic metaphysical picture." — MathSciNet

From the Publisher