The Old New Logic: Essays On The Philosophy Of Fred Sommers

by David S. Oderberg (Editor), P. F. Strawson (Foreword)

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years, philosopher Fred Sommers has taken on the monumental task of reviving the development of Aristotelian (syllogistic) logic after it was supplanted by the predicate logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The enormousness of Sommers's undertaking can be gauged by the fact that most philosophers had come to believe—as David S. Oderberg writes in his preface—that "Aristotelian logic was good but is now as good as dead." A revival of traditional syllogistic logic would involve not only its restatement but its refashioning into a system that could rival the elegance and deductive power of predicate logic. Building on work by medieval scholastic logicians, Leibniz, and nineteenth-century algebraic logicians, Sommers accomplished this renovation and rehabilitation of syllogistic logic with his magnum opus The Logic of Natural Language, published in 1982. In The Old New Logic , essays by a diverse group of contributors show how widely influential Sommers's work has been—not only in logic, but in category theory and other areas. Scholars in psychology, linguistics, and computer science join philosophers and logicians in discussing aspects of Sommers's contributions to philosophy. Sommers himself provides an intellectual autobiography at the beginning and in the final chapter offers comments on the contributions. This collection should help bring to Sommers's work the attention it deserves from the wider philosophical and intellectual community.

242 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2005

About the author

Professor David Simon Oderberg (born 1963) is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

Reviews

[John Reis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sommers’ term logic is interesting. I am not saying that I will want to learn it in full. I do not find that I need formal logical methods all that often nowadays. Or perhaps, they are ingrained. This book is a collection of essays on Sommers’ category theory and his term logic.

In the first essay, Sommers claims that he became interested in term logic because he could see children reasoning but that it did not look like they were doing predicate calculus. In a later essay a research psychologist talks about the relation between Sommers’ category theory and how children seem to learn how to not make category mistakes. Oderberg’s final essay “Predicate Logic and Bare Particulars” is interesting. There is one essay that I did not understand and gave up on.