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Logic and the Self: After Certain Crises in Western Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Bas C van Fraassen
Bas C van Fraassen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University and San Francisco State University, USA
*
Bas C van Fraassen, Princeton University and San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Delivered on the occasion of the 2009 “Giulio Preti Prize”, this lecture examines and questions the contrast between the sense of intellectual crisis in the scientific world of the first decades of the 20th century and the absence of any such sense of crisis in current philosophy. Starting in the 19the century, we were confronted with changes in perspective that affected our relation to the universe we live in as well as to our own language and logic. Not only how we see ourselves but the tools by means of which we think about ourselves came into question. How would it be possible to rationally assess conceptual change that affects the very form of reasoning by which we assess

such changes? Such are the paradoxes to which philosophers and scientists, in the throes of crisis in the first half of the 20th century, tried to respond. Philosophers today may seemingly have overcome those aporias that vexed their recent predecessors, in denial of the existence of a crisis that should actually be a fecund source for reflection.

Type
Articles
Information
Diogenes , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2011 , pp. 21 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2012

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