Logik und Semiotik in der Philosophie von Leibniz

ISBN: 3-88405-001-X

This book provides the first account of the Janus-headed character of Leibniz’s philosophy. Burkhardt presents not only an exhaustive survey of the background of Leibniz’s thought in scholasticism, but also an estimation of his significance for contemporary logic and philosophy. On the one hand Leibniz is a representative of protestant Aristotelianism. His philosophical training was scholastic; his terminology is scholastic. On the other hand, it was he who developed the first logical calculi. His work on the theory of possible worlds means that he can be regarded as a precursor of possible world semantics in modal logic. And deontic logic, ton, makes its first appearance in Leibniz's writings. He did original work also in probability theory, an area which at his time stand in a close relationship with logic. It was only with the development of mathematical logic by Boole and Frege that Leibniz’s achievements in logic and semiotic could properly be grasped. An account of his contributions to these fields therefore presupposes a knowledge of those branches of Contemporary mathematical logic which he anticipated Leibniz was also highly original in the area of linguistics. He put forward a series of theories and analyses in rational grammar which have hitherto been little considered in the literature. The present work offers, then, systematic discussions of the syllogism, of rational grammar, of the characteristica universalis, of combinatorics. It deals with the development of logical calculi, the relation between algebra and logic, geometry, ontic and deontic modal logic, the interconnections between logic and probability theory, and the relations between ontology, logic and semiotics.

Of interest to:
Logicians, philosophers, linguists, and philosophers of science

Munich: 1980, 488 pp., index, bibliography, library binding