Abstract
“There is no such thing as philosophical logic”, Wittgenstein said in a letter to C. K. Ogden.1 In spite of his veto the term now has an established use. It could be defined as signifying the applications of the tools of formal logic to the analysis of concepts and conceptual structures in which philosophers traditionally have taken interest. Pursuits in this spirit sometimes shed interesting light on old problems. More often perhaps they give rise to new problems and steer the interest of philosophers in new directions.
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References
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden, Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Kegan Paul, London 1973, letter of 23 April, 1922, p. 20.
It was the vision of such a General Theory that inspired my first and major contribution to modal logic, An Essay in Modal Logic, North-Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 1951.
In Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 6. Reihe, Vol. I, Otto Reichl Verlag, Darmstadt, 1930.
Leibniz, op. cit., p. 469; An Essay in Modal Logic, p. v.
A. Höfler, ‘Abhangigkeitsbeziehungen zwischen Abhangigkeitsbeziehungen’ Sitzungs- berichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-histori- sche Klasse 181 (1917).
The main sources among Bentham’s works are An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, London, 1970, and Of Laws in General, ed. by H. L. A. Hart, London, 1970.
Untersuchungen über den Modalkalkül, Westkulturverlag Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan, 1952.
Published as an appendix to Logica deontica e semantica, Atti del Convegno tenuto a Bielefeld 17–22 marzo 1975, ed. by G. di Bernardo, Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna, 1977.
My own contributions to it are embodied, chiefly, in Norm and Action, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963, in An Essay in Deontic Logic and the General Theory of Action, North-Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 1968, and in the paper ‘Handlungslogik’ in Normenlogik, ed. by H. Lenk, Verlag Dokumentation, Pullach bei München, 1974.
See J. Jørgensen, ‘Imperatives and Logic’, Erkenntnis 1 (1937–1938) and Alf Ross, ‘Imperatives and Logic’, Theoria 7 (1941).
Cf. W. Dubislaw, ‘Zur Unbegründbarkeit der Forderungssätze’. Theoria 3 (1937), especially p. 238ff. Also Ross, op. cit., p. 55.
Bentham, Of Laws in General, p. 154.
I. Hedenius, Om rätt och moral, Tidens Förlag, Stockholm, 1941.
C. E. Alchourrón, ‘Logic of Norms and Logic of Normative Propositions’, Logique et Analyse 12 (1969), and C. E. Alchourrón and E. Bulygin, Normative Systems, Springer Verlag, Wien, 1971.
A. R. Anderson, ‘A Reduction of Deontic Logic to Alethic Modal Logic’, Mind 67 (1958). A very similar proposal had been made by Stig Kanger in an unpublished paper from the year 1950.
Cf. P. H. Nowell-Smith and E. J. Lemmon, ‘Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics’, Mind 69 (1960).
On the Logic and Ontology of Norms’, Philosophical Logic, ed. by J. W. Davis, D. J. Hockney, and W. K. Wilson, D. Reidel, Publ. Co., Dordrecht, Holland, 1969.
This problem is discussed, for example, by Hans Kelsen in his classic works Reine Rechtslehre, Deuticke, Wien, 1934; and General Theory of Law and State, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1949; and in the paper ‘Recht und Logik’, Neues Forum 12 (1965). See also O. Weinberger, Rechtslogik, Springer Verlag, Wien, 1970.
Becker, op. cit., p. 41; Kalinowski, op. cit., p. 147, ‘Deontic Logic’, p. 2.
Quantifiers in Deontic Logic’, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 23 (1957).
A. N. Prior, Formal Logic, Oxford University Press, London, 1955.
A. R. Anderson, The Formal Analysis of Normative Systems’, Technical Report No. 2, Contract No. SAR/Nonr-609 (16), Office of Naval Research, Group Psychology Branch, New Haven, 1956, reprinted in The Logic of Decision and Action, ed. by N. Rescher, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1967.
Cf. my papers ‘Deontic Logic Revisited’, Rechtstheorie 4 (1973); and ‘Handlungs-logik’ in Normenlogik, ed. by H. Lenk, Verlag Dokumentation. Pullach bei München, 1974.
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Von Wright, G.H. (1981). Problems and Prospects of Deontic Logic a Survey. In: Agazzi, E. (eds) Modern Logic — A Survey. Synthese Library, vol 149. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9056-2_22
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