Show description

As Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ (Whitehead (1929), p. 39). Medieval philosophy (beginning in the late fifth century, and lasting until the fourteenth century) was, in the main, a project of reconciling the doctrines of the three great monotheistic religions, especially Christianity, with ancient Greek metaphysics – to which, as just noted, we owe the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

Is there a single correct system of logic? How do scientific hypotheses relate to observational evidence? Can we both say everything we want to say about certain infinite mathematical structures and also deduce every statement that follows logically from what we say? Can all mathematical truths be proved from suitably chosen first principles? , free from internal contradiction? Is all of natural language suitable for logical formalization, as far as its declarative sentences are concerned? Or does the recent success of modern Logic have to stop short at, and be limited to, the analysis of mathematical statements and their logical relations?

Only those among the latter who already talk, and can still talk? Or should the circle of concern be widened, to include not only human beings, but also all primates? or all mammals? or all vertebrates? or all creatures with rudimentary nervous systems? With this last question, we see how Metaphysics, Epistemology and Moral Philosophy can intersect. Is there something it is like to be a creature of type X? Can it suffer? If so, oughtn’t we to care about its well-being, for its own sake, and not just for ours?