NOL Seminar with Wilfrid Hodges
published: 2021-05-04
event date:
2021-05-24
The Nordic Online Logic Seminar is organised monthly over Zoom, with expository talks on topics of interest for the broader logic community. The seminar is open for professional or aspiring logicians and logic aficionados worldwide. If you wish to receive the Zoom ID and password for it, as well as further announcements, please subscribe here: https://listserv.gu.se/sympa/subscribe/nordiclogic.
Next talk: Monday, May 24, 16.00-17.30 CEST (UTC+2), on Zoom (details will be provided to the subscribers)
Title: How the teenage Avicenna planned out several new logics
Speaker: Professor Wilfrid Hodges, Fellow of the British Academy
Abstract: Almost exactly a thousand years ago a teenager known today as Avicenna lived in what is now Uzbekistan. He made a resolution to teach himself Aristotelian logic, armed with an Arabic translation of Aristotle and a century-old Arabic textbook of logic. A couple of years later, around his eighteenth birthday, he wrote a brief report of what he had learned. Six months ago I started to examine this report - I suspect I am the first logician to do that. It contains many surprising things. Besides introducing some new ideas that readers of Avicenna know from his later works, it also identifies some specific points of modal logic where Avicenna was sure that Aristotle had made a mistake. People had criticised Aristotle’s logic before, but not at these points. At first Avicenna had no clear understanding of how to do modal logic, and it took him another thirty years to justify all the criticisms of Aristotle in his report. But meanwhile he discovered for himself how to defend a new logic by building new foundations. I think the logic itself is interesting, but the talk will concentrate on another aspect. These recent discoveries mean that Avicenna is the earliest known logician who creates new logics and tells us what he is doing, and why, at each stage along the way.