Bücher der Reihe Jaakko Hintikka Selected Papers

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light on our own conceptual presuppositions. This collection comprises several striking interpretations that Jaakko Hintikka has put forward over the years, constituting a challenge not only to Aristotelian scholars and historians of ideas, but to everyone interested in logic, epistemology or metaphysics and in their history.

Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to get clear about. For one important instance, in The Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what name-object relationships amount to in his view.

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. Aristotle thus serves as an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light on our own conceptual presuppositions.

Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? Using this new logic, Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal deductive strategies.

Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting, including the concept of scope, the hegemony of generative syntax, the Frege-Russell claim that verbs like `is' are ambiguous, and the assumptions underlying the so-called New Theory of Reference.

One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny.

Collingwood saw one of the main tasks of philosophers and of historians of human thought in uncovering what he called the ultimate presuppositions of different thinkers, of different philosophical movements and of entire eras of intellectual history.

Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting, including the concept of scope, the hegemony of generative syntax, the Frege-Russell claim that verbs like `is' are ambiguous, and the assumptions underlying the so-called New Theory of Reference.

One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny.

Collingwood saw one of the main tasks of philosophers and of historians of human thought in uncovering what he called the ultimate presuppositions of different thinkers, of different philosophical movements and of entire eras of intellectual history.

Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? Using this new logic, Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal deductive strategies.