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History of Philosophy
The term, "philosophy," although used universally, is a culturally specific term; it is a European concept embracing
a wide range of human activities of the mind. It's application has varied widely throughout European history, and
its application to non-European cultures is mainly a convenience but does not accurately reflect how non-
European cultures would conceive of or classify these activities.
The word itself is a Greek word and means "love (philo) of wisdom (sophy)." As a word, it seems to appear in the
fifth century BC, but the great exponents of the term to describe a heterogenous mix of thinking activities are Plato
and Aristotle, the two gigantic figures of Greek philosophy.
Early Greek philosophy was largely concerned with overarching explanations to explain physical phenomenon.
The earliest Greek "philosophy" was probably a poem by Hesiod called the Theogony , which concerns the nature
of the gods. The Theogony largely recounts Greek mythology, but interspersed among the stories are speculations
about the physical nature of the universe.
The early Greek philosophers were primarily concerned with the problem of the "One and the Many." Simply
stated, the problem involves explaining the infinity of things in the universe (the many). We can see that many
separate things can be related to one thing, for instance, there are millions of horses but there is only one concept
of a horse. So the myriad and manifold phenomena of the universe must be reducible to a single, unifying
substance or concept. The early Greeks believed that this single, unifying thing (the One) was some material
substance, like water, or air. Later Greek philosophy would conceive of this one thing as something more abstract,
like number.
So early Greek philosophy was speculative, that is, it wasn't concerned with phenomena and factuality as much as
it was concerned with the reasoning process itself. From the beginning, Greek philosophy was concerned with this
reasoning process, particularly the process of rational demonstration. The truth of a proposition was an aspect of
its demonstration, not its physical reality; a flawless rational demonstration produced certain knowledge.
Most of this speculation concerned the nature of the changing, physical world. The early Greek philosophers
were concerned with finding the unchanging principle or substance that lay behind all change and phenomena.
The stable, unchanging component of the universe the Greeks called, physis , so early Greek philosophy was really
a speculativephysics.
Eventually, a wide range of activities would be subsumed under the category of philosophy, representing the
entire range of human rational activities. The unifying factor was demonstration, that is, each activity was a
philosophy in that it involved principles of rational demonstration.
What is Logic
The science or art of exact reasoning, or of pure and formal thought, or of the laws
according to which the processes of pure thinking should be conducted; the science of the
formation and application of general notions; the science of generalization, judgment,
classification, reasoning, and systematic arrangement; correct reasoning.
Limitations of logic
These apprehensions do not arise in the case of modal logic, which may be defined, in the
narrow sense, as the study of logical necessity and possibility; for even quantified modal logic
admits of a complete axiomatization. Other, related problems nevertheless arise in this area. It is
tempting to try to interpret such a notion as logical necessity as a syntactical predicate; i.e., as a
predicate the applicability of which depends only on the form of the sentence claimed to be
necessary—rather like the applicability of formal rules of proof. It has been shown, however, by
Richard Montague, an American logician, that this cannot be done for the usual systems of
modal logic.
Importance of Logic