display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
4 ideas
22873 | Liberalism should improve the system, and not just ameliorate it [Dewey] |
Full Idea: Liberalism must become radical in the sense that, instead of using social power to ameliorate the evil consequences of the existing system, it shall use social power to change the system. | |
From: John Dewey (The Later Works (17 vols, ed Boydston) [1930], 11:287), quoted by David Hildebrand - Dewey 4 'Dewey' | |
A reaction: Conservative liberals ask what people want, and try to give it to them. Radical liberals ask what people actually need, and try to make it possible. The latter is bound to be a bit paternalistic, but will probably create a better world. |
18739 | Three stages of philosophical logic: syntactic (1905-55), possible worlds (1963-85), widening (1990-) [Horsten/Pettigrew] |
Full Idea: Three periods can be distinguished in philosophical logic: the syntactic stage, from Russell's definite descriptions to the 1950s, the dominance of possible world semantics from the 50s to 80s, and a current widening of the subject. | |
From: Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R (Mathematical Methods in Philosophy [2014], 1) | |
A reaction: [compressed] I've read elsewhere that the arrival of Tarski's account of truth in 1933, taking things beyond the syntactic, was also a landmark. |
18741 | Logical formalization makes concepts precise, and also shows their interrelation [Horsten/Pettigrew] |
Full Idea: Logical formalization forces the investigator to make the central philosophical concepts precise. It can also show how some philosophical concepts and objects can be defined in terms of others. | |
From: Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R (Mathematical Methods in Philosophy [2014], 2) | |
A reaction: This is the main rationale of the highly formal and mathematical approach to such things. The downside is when you impose 'precision' on language that was never intended to be precise. |
18744 | Models are sets with functions and relations, and truth built up from the components [Horsten/Pettigrew] |
Full Idea: A (logical) model is a set with functions and relations defined on it that specify the denotation of the non-logical vocabulary. A series of recursive clauses explicate how truth values of complex sentences are compositionally determined from the parts. | |
From: Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R (Mathematical Methods in Philosophy [2014], 3) | |
A reaction: See the ideas on 'Functions in logic' and 'Relations in logic' (in the alphabetical list) to expand this important idea. |