Aristotle: Logic Aristotelian logic, after a great and early triumph, consolidated its position of influence to rule over the philosophical world throughout the Middle Ages up until the 19th Century.  All that changed in a hurry when modern logicians embraced a new kind of mathematical logic and pushed out what they regarded as the antiquated and clunky method of syllogisms.  Although Aristotle’s very rich and

Tu Weiming (1940—) Tu Weiming (pinyin: Du Weiming) is one of the most famous Chinese Confucian thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a prominent member of the third generation of “New Confucians,” Tu stressed the significance of religiosity within Confucianism. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan as well as his decades of study and teaching at Princeton University, the University of California, and

Gettier Problems Gettier problems or cases are named in honor of the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who discovered them in 1963. They function as challenges to the philosophical tradition of defining knowledge of a proposition as justified true belief in that proposition. The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has a belief that is both true and well supported by evidence, yet

Natural Deduction Natural Deduction (ND) is a common name for the class of proof systems composed of simple and self-evident inference rules based upon methods of proof and traditional ways of reasoning that have been applied since antiquity in deductive practice. The first formal ND systems were independently constructed in the 1930s by G. Gentzen and S. Jaśkowski and proposed as an alternative to Hilbert-style axiomatic systems. Gentzen introduced a