Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry. Struever views rhetoric ...

This edited volume presents a comprehensive history of modern logic from the Middle Ages through the end of the twentieth century. In addition to a history of symbolic logic, the contributors also examine developments in the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic in modern times. The book begins with chapters on late medieval developments and logic and philosophy of logic from Humanism to Kant. The following chapters focus on the emergence of symbolic logic with special emphasis on the relations between logic and mathematics, on the one hand, and on logic and philosophy, on the other. This discussion is completed by a chapter on the themes of judgment and inference from 1837-1936. The volume contains a section on the development of mathematical logic from 1900-1935, followed by a section on main trends in mathematical logic after the 1930s. The volume goes on to discuss modal logic from Kant till the late twentieth century, and logic and semantics in the twentieth century; the philosophy of alternative logics; the philosophical aspects of inductive logic; the relations between logic and linguistics in the twentieth century; the relationship between logic and artificial intelligence; and ends with a presentation of the main schools of Indian logic. The Development of Modern Logic includes many prominent philosophers from around the world who work in the philosophy and history of mathematics and logic, who not only survey developments in a given period or area but also seek to make new contributions to contemporary research in the field. It is the first volume to discuss the field with this breadth of coverage and depth, and will appeal to scholars and students of logic and its philosophy.

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, grounding his phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading.

What is early modern philosophy? Two interpretative trends have predominated in the related literature. One, with roots in the work of Hegel and Heidegger, sees early modern thinking either as the outcome of a process of gradual rationalization (leading to the principle of sufficient reason, and to “ontology” as distinct from metaphysics), or as a reflection of an inherent subjectivity or representational semantics. The other sees it as reformulations of medieval versions of substance and cause, suggested by, or leading to, early modern scientific developments. This book proposes a rather different kind of explanation. It suggests that the concept of relation, specifically that of dyadic, anti-symmetrical relations, can throw light on a wide variety of developments in early modern thought, such as those concerning causality, sense perception, temporality, and the mereological approach to substance. The book argues that these relations are grounded in an interpretation of causal influence, and not in semantic theories or subjectivity. Furthermore, if it is correct that the problem of unity was, for most of classical antiquity, what the problems of motion, causality and perception were for early modern thinkers, then early modern thought is much closer to the thought of Aristotle than is commonly supposed. The genesis of early modern thought might instead be taken to have occurred in opposition to one aspect of the thought of Duns Scotus (an aspect that lives on in contemporary Neo-Aristotelianism), and that can be explained once the relational perspective examined here is taken into account.

This dissertation studies the modal system of Persian music. While modern Iranian musicians explain their music as a of seven dastgah plus five sub-dastgah called avaz, the dominant interpretation in the ethnomusicology literature describes the Persian modal system as a set of twelve dastgah. Part I of this dissertation studies how the system of seven dastgah and five avaz was introduced to the ethnomusicology literature and how it was simplified as a set of twelve dastgah. Part I shows that the modal system of Persian music was introduced to the ethnomusicology literature by a generation of Persian musicians who were trained in European music and thus were a hybrid of insider and outsider. Part II studies the historical root of the concept of dastgah. Persian writings on modulation from one mode to another date back to the fourteenth century. This theme was developed into a few collections of modes which were meant to help musicians as modulation instruction. Those collections were developed further and found an order which advised musicians to perform modes in sequences. Modulation instructions were titled "shad" in the seventeenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the shad was developed further and was renamed dastgah. Part III shows that, while dastgah was an important concept of multi-modal performance, avaz was the general term for Persian modes. Various sources form the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including musical texts, diaries and travel accounts, old newspapers, early European publications on Persian music, early Persian books on music, and the first catalog of Persian records show that avaz was the general term to refer to Persian modes. Part IV studies the impact of early commercial records on the formation of the Persian modal system. During the first recording session, most labels featured an avaz or a tasnif (song), while seven sets of records were allocated to record the seven dastgah briefly. During the subsequent recording sessions, not only the number of recorded modes decreased, but also more tracks were allocated to the few popular modes. The top ten recorded modes included five avaz that were the central modes of five of the seven dastgah, and five other avaz that became popular through the process of recording. When the seven dastgah were retrieved as an icon of national identity, the five popular avaz retained their modal status but the rest of the avaz were downgraded as pieces of a dastgah only. During the interwar recording sessions, the pattern for coupling tracks on double-sided Persian records was coupling two rhythmic performances in the same mode or two non-rhythmic performances in related modes. Those related modes (avaz) were usually included in a certain dastgah or followed another avaz that was more popular. Each double-sided record became a mode unit, thus, the five popular dastgah were squeezed into one mode while the five popular avaz were extended into smaller dastgah.

The German lacuna in Edward Said’s 'Orientalism' has produced varied studies of German cultural and academic Orientalisms. So far the domains of German politics and scholarship have not been conflated to probe the central power/knowledge nexus of Said’s argument. Seeking to fill this gap, the diplomatic career and scholarly-literary productions of the centrally placed Friedrich Rosen serve as a focal point to investigate how politics influenced knowledge generated about the “Orient” and charts the roles knowledge played in political decision-making regarding extra-European regions. This is pursued through analyses of Germans in British imperialist contexts, cultures of lowly diplomatic encounters in Middle Eastern cities, Persian poetry in translation, prestigious Orientalist congresses in northern climes, leveraging knowledge in high-stakes diplomatic encounters, and the making of Germany’s Islam policy up to the Great War. Politics drew on bodies of knowledge and could promote or hinder scholarship. Yet, scholars never systemically followed empire in its tracks but sought their own paths to cognition. On their own terms or influenced by “Oriental” savants they aligned with politics or challenged claims to conquest and rule.