John Buridan on self-reference

Description

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists, and logicians, who are increasingly finding in Medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns.

Subjects

Other Editions

• John Buridan on self-reference: chapter eight of Buridan's SophismataCambridge University Press1982-01-01
• John Buridan on self-referenceCambridge University Press1982
• John Buridan on Self-ReferencePaperbackCambridge University Press1982-10-29
• John Buridan on Self-ReferenceHardcoverCambridge University Press1982-10-29