Niko Strobach

A letter on the present state of affairs

The paper re-evaluates Prior’s tenets about indeterminism and relativity from the point of view of the current state of the debate. We first discuss Prior’s claims about indeterministic tense logic and about relativity separately and confront them with new technical developments. Then we combine the two topics in a discussion of indeterministic approaches to space–time logics. Finally we show why Prior would not have to “dig his heels in” when it comes to relativity: We point out a way of combining the existential import of the distinction between past, present, and future with a frame-relative notion of the present.

Logik und Methodologie

Hatte Platon schon eine Logik, wie es ein Buchtitel wie The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic (Lutoslawski 1897) einst als selbstverstandlich suggerieren konnte? Besas er eine Methodologie? Das hangt ganz davon ab, wie explizit eine Beschreibung sein muss, um als Logik oder Methodologie zu gelten, wenn Methodologie (methodology) eine »explicit discussion of method « ist (Benson 2006, 86, nach Robinson 1953, 61, der dazu eine Tendenz im mittleren und spaten Werk Platons sieht).

An angry young man

This paper is about one of Arthur Prior’s earliest publications in philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual” (Austral J Psychol Philos 15:394–398, 1937). Its aims are (1) to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s which should be read with some attention to its historical background, which closely follows John Wisdom as to its theoretical elements, in particular the notion of a “logical construction”, but which is more clearly eliminativist with regard to nations and which is original in terms of rather bold ethical consequences; (2) to interpret Prior’s/Wisdom’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation and to connect Prior’s/Wisdom’s ideas with John Searle’s recent work on social ontology.

The So-Called Materially Valid Inferences and the Logic of Concepts

The so-called materially valid inferences have come to new prominence through the work of Robert Brandom. This paper introduces a fragment of a logic of concepts that does not reduce concepts to their extensions. Concept logic and its semantics allow us to represent the conceptual knowledge used in material inferences and thus suggest a way to deal with them.