Here’s W. V. O. Quine discussing the fact that Frege didn’t adopt a type theoretic approach (like Russell and Whitehead’s) when faced with Russell’s paradox. Actually, it is not to be wondered that Frege did not think of this course, or, thinking of it, adopt it. It was by having all his classes at ground […]
November 16, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
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Here are the final three sentences of Alberto Coffa’s “Kant, Bolzano, and the Emergence of Logicism” (Journal of Philosophy, 74, 1982, p. 689): When concepts were finally wedded to the word, a priori knowledge turned from true in virtue of concepts to true in virtue of meanings—as Carnap put it—or true ex vi terminorum—as Wilfred […]
March 14, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
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Here is John Burgess’s amusing description of Quine’s view of mathematical ontology as motivated by the indispensability argument, from “Mathematics and the Bleak House” (Phil. Math. 12, 2004). Quine…urged a very different sort of reason for accepting the existence of numbers (or other abstract mathematical entities to which numbers could be “reduced”). According to Quine, […]
July 24, 2016 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
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