Russia is a country of extremes, as everyone knows. No matter what we do we are driven, as a rule, now to the extreme left and then to the extreme right. In the contemporary historiography of Soviet philosophy, such extreme turns lie at the surface. Among such extremes, I would include, in particular, the article "The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR" [Podavlenie filosofii v SSSR], which appeared in Russian Philosophy. A Concise Encyclopedic Dictionary [Russkaia filosofiia. Malyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar'] (...) . I do not wish to say that one should not write about the suppression of Soviet philosophy. The problem is to maintain the necessary proportions. (shrink)

Tarski’s Indefinability Theorem can be generalized so that it applies to many-valued languages. We introduce a notion of strong semantic self-representation applicable to any (sufficiently rich) interpreted many-valued language L. A sufficiently rich interpreted many-valued language L is SSSR just in case it has a function symbol n(x) such that, for any f Sent(L), the denotation of the term n(“f”) in L is precisely ||f||L, the semantic value of f in L. By a simple diagonal construction (finding a sentence (...) l such that l is equivalent to n(“l”) T), it is shown that no such language strongly represents itself semantically. Hence, no such language can be its own metalanguage. (shrink)

With a new foreword by Paul Kelly 'I regard Hayek's work as a new opening of the most fundamental debate in the field of political philosophy' - Sir Karl Popper 'This promises to be the crowning work of a scholar who has devoted a lifetime to thinking about society and its values. The entire work must surely amount to an immense contribution to social and legal philosophy' - Philosophical Studies Law, Legislation and Liberty is Hayek's major statement of political philosophy (...) and one of the most ambitious yet subtle defences of a free market society ever written. A robust defence of individual liberty, it is also crucial for understanding Hayek's influential views concerning the role of the state: far from being an innocent bystander, he argues that the state has an important role to play in defending the norms and practices of an ordered and free society. His arguments had a profound influence on the policies of Thatcher in the 1980s and resonate today in visions of the 'Big Society'. First published in three separate volumes, this Routledge Classics edition makes one of his most important books available in a single volume. Essential reading for understanding the background to the recent world economic turmoil and financial crisis, it also foreshadows the subsequent heated debate about regulation and political governance if such disasters are to be avoided in the future. (shrink)

For 20th century mathematicians, the role of Cantor's sets has been that of the ideally featureless canvases on which all needed algebraic and geometrical structures can be painted. (Certain passages in Cantor's writings refer to this role.) Clearly, the resulting contradication, 'the points of such sets are distinc yet indistinguishable', should not lead to inconsistency. Indeed, the productive nature of this dialectic is made explicit by a method fruitful in other parts of mathematics (see 'Adjointness in Foundations', Dialectia 1969). This (...) role of Cantor's theory is compared with the role of Galois theory in algebraic geometry. (shrink)