Necessary truth and convention

By Sidelle, Alan

Necessary truths have always seemed problematic, particularly to empiricists and other naturalistically-minded philosophers. Our knowledge here is a priori - grounded in appeals to what we can imagine ...

Logical laws

By Restall, Greg

There are at least three different kinds of answer to the question ‘What is a logical law?’ One establishes what it means for something to be a logical ...

Monad

By McDonough, Jeffrey K.; Nguyen, Tran (Jen)

Monads serve as the metaphysical foundations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s mature metaphysics. In doing so they play a metaphysical role similar to the metaphysical role of atoms in ...

Logic, philosophy of

By Forbes, Graeme

Philosophy of logic can be roughly characterized as those philosophical topics which have emerged either from the technical development of symbolic (mathematical) logic, or from the motivations that ...

A priori

By Moser, Paul K.

An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or warrant, from ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

A priori

An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or justification, from ...

Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89)

By MacDonald, Graham

A.J. Ayer made his name as a philosopher with the publication of Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, a book which established him as the leading English representative ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Conventionalism

By Horwich, Paul

How is it known that every number has a successor, that straight lines can intersect each other no more than once, that causes precede their events, and that ...

Analyticity

By Bealer, George

In Critique of Pure ReasonKant introduced the term ‘analytic’ for judgments whose truth is guaranteed by a certain relation of ‘containment’ between the constituent concepts, and ‘synthetic’ for ...