Graham Priest's "The Closing of the Mind: How the Particular Quantifier became Existentially Loaded Behind Our Backs" is entirely dedicated to the history of logic, which is where Priest is the most fun to read. I have no idea how long the issue it's printed in will remain free online; I'd expect indefinitely, but one can never tell with this sort of thing.
On the topic of being free online, someone has scanned in the Cerf & Harris translation of Hegel's "Faith and Knowledge", which is convenient since the book is a bit hard to come by -- it's long been out of print, and Amazon only has two used copies, the cheapest of which is $89. They appear to have not scanned in Harris's lengthy introduction; it's worth hunting down a paper copy just to read that. (Cerf's introduction is fine, but less remarkable because not fifty pages long.) [Link to download is dead; e-mail me if you care about the book.]
On a possibly unrelated note, I've read the first three chapters of Paul Redding's "Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought", and it's excellent so far. The later chapters promise to expand on some cryptic remarks about Hegel's logic as a combination of Aristotelian term logic and Kantian propositional (judgement-centered) logic, with an eye to explaining Hegel's notorious claim that "All things are contradictory". It will certainly be interesting to see how/if Redding cashes out his promissory notes.
A non sequitur: For some reason I had something called "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" in my bookmarks. I don't know when or how I came across it; I vaguely remember being amused by it very late one night as an undergrad. Some of the linked papers are certainly not without interest, and Dudman is pleasant to read. I recall a Language Log post from not-too-long-back mentioning that English does not have a "future tense", but rather uses a variety of idioms to refer to future events & states. It was interesting to see someone making that point do philosophical work. (In addition to making grammar do work for us in other areas -- I'm not sure what I think of "Antecedents and Consequents", but it was certainly a stimulating read.)
Oh hey, a bit of synchronicity: A footnote in Dudman's "On a Point of Logic" notes that the article grew out of correspondence with Isaac Levi. I still have no idea why I had been to "The Revolutionary... 'IF'" before, but it is neat that Isaac Levi seems relevant to the neat things there.
21 August 2008
some links to things
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Re: articles and journals remaining free, or not.
You might know about this already, but you might not:
Have you received a "cNet ID" yet? (If you have a [whatever]@uchicago.edu e-mail address, then your cNet ID is [whatever])
If so, then you can access all the journals that you could access from any of the campus computers from your computer at home, using the proxy service. Info is available here:
http://nsit.uchicago.edu/docs/web/proxy/using/
I didn't know about the proxy service; that might be more convenient than going through the library site &c. whenever I want to look for something on JStor. I've not yet seen any of the computers on campus -- don't move up for a few weeks still (lease starts on the ninth).
Got my CNet ID back in May or June; it was needed for some of the last bits of registration IIRC.
The note about things possibly not being free forever was for the benefit of random people who might click on the link at some point. It also gave me a nice segue into the Mediafire link.
One reason for the resurgence of right-Hegelianism:
it's sort of the philosophaster's dispensation. With Hegel the student can seem dee-eep and German, and still be a protestant: GWFH loved Luther, not to say Machiavelli and roman emperors as much as he admired Aristotle and greeks.
Hegel: he makes the frat-boy, xtian philo-fraud happy, and pleases his Vati-warbucks too! Heritage. Plus even the dimwitted pomo-marxist sort respects Hegel.
Moreover if you can't compete with real logicians or scientists, you can always fake it via Hegelian jargon wanking (or theological jargon), as Bertrand Russell well knew.
For that matter, even if one grants that dialectically reasoning works in some sense as a model, it has little or no predictive value--the Hegelian can no more predict historical events than a statistician might....(nature is not contradictory, or discrete--logic is)
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