Many of the greatest philosophers have used the form of the dialogue to expound their arguments, yet the vehicle itself has been inadequately studied. The three essays in this volume examine the reasons why particular philosophers have chosen to use the dialogue as a tool to interact between the philosophical content and the literary form.

Philosophical Dialogues: Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein (Proceedings of the British Academy: Themed volumes of essays in the humanities and social sciences, 85)

Literature & Fiction

Smiley, Timothy

History & Criticism

The British Academy

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a natural point of entry to what for most readers will be a new subject. Plural logic deals with plural terms ('Whitehead and Russell', 'Henry VIII's wives', 'the real numbers', 'the square root of -1', 'they'), plural predicates ('surrounded the fort', 'are prime', 'are consistent', 'imply'), and plural quantification ('some things', 'any things'). Current logic is singularist: its terms stand for at most one thing. By contrast, the foundational thesis of this book is that a particular term may legitimately stand for several things at once; in other words, there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation. The authors argue that plural phenomena need to be taken seriously and that the only viable response is to adopt a plural logic, a logic based on plural denotation. They expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists. A formal system of plural logic is presented in three stages, before being applied to Cantorian set theory as an illustration. Technicalities have been kept to a minimum, and anyone who is familiar with the classical predicate calculus should be able to follow it. The authors' approach is an attractive blend of no-nonsense argumentative directness and open-minded liberalism, and they convey the exciting and unexpected richness of their subject. Mathematicians and linguists, as well as logicians and philosophers, will find surprises in this book.

Plural Logic: Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged

Politics & Social Sciences

Oliver, Alex

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

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