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© 2007 – Manuscrito – Revista Internacional de Filosofia |
Coleção CLE - Volume 42 |
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Oswaldo Chateaubriand
Logical Forms
Part II - Logic, Language and Knowledge
Two questions that preoccupied me in the seventies motivated me to write this book. (1) What is the relation between a statement (sentence, proposition) and reality? (2) What is the fundamental character of logic? Part I develops an answer to (1) and Part II develops an answer to (2). The Introduction and Chapter 1 give an outline of these answers.
As I worked on the book, however, more and more of my life’s experience teaching and researching questions of philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of language became relevant to the subjects that I was discussing. So, the outcome is not just an attempt to answer questions (1) and (2), but is also, and perhaps primarily, a formulation of a working philosophical viewpoint.
My viewpoint is essentially realist and metaphysical, influenced to a very large extent by works of Plato, Aristotle, Frege, Russell, Gödel and Hardy, among others. My aim in the book is to develop some aspects of this viewpoint. Evidently, since I touch upon many different issues, it is not possible to pursue them all in detail, and I will have to do that in other writings. Nevertheless, I think that my answers to questions (1) and (2) are developed in sufficient detail to serve as a basis for discussion.
In “Mathematical Proof” Hardy classifies philosophies as sympathetic and unsympathetic, tenable and untenable. I hope that some readers will find the kind of view that I develop here as sympathetic as I do, and I hope to show that it is at least as tenable as other views currently in vogue. |