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Il senso e la narrazione = The sense and the narration
Humans are creatures of narration: infinitely they narrate and narrate themselves, intertwine dialogues, light up stories to illuminate the dark caves of the heart and the world, recover and transmute memories. We live between a firm and rough, unknowable reality, an enormous furnace of perturbations and calls and colors, and an elusive, delicate and ephemeral interiority: and between the two, between the world and us, we weave with thought and with words a fragile ponte, a bridge called sense. Swing this bridge at the unequal breath of a cosmic wind, dropping phosphoric fragments: sudden hourglasses, anonymous centaurs, sleepless geometers, distant syllogisms, vanished lineages, black basalts, crazy anchorites, silent plesiosaurs, flutes and bagpipes ... and they recompose figures, and we ask ourselves questions about those figures and tell stories. Only the vertigo of asking and narrating can give meaning to a life that some say is interwoven with pure chance. Forever detached from the flourishing matrix of the world, tormented by thought, prisoners of words, slaves of interpretation, lost in a long corridor of facing mirrors: we are at the center of a great, incomprehensible rumble.
Extensionalism : The Revolution in Logic
This vivid and thought-provoking book by the Israeli logician Nimrod Bar-Am impels one to rethink the place of logic in Western thought. It shows that the history of logic from Aristotle to Tarski is the history of the gradual undoing of the classic conflation of logic and empirical science. It sets tomorrow’s agenda for philosophers and historians of logic and scientific method by taking as its starting point the mere fact that, curiously, ancient logic is not as formal as current literature presents it. Rather, as Bar-Am explains, modern formal logic became possible only after a series of bold criticisms of the magnificent Aristotelian system. These criticisms begin with David Hume’s declaration that logic does not sanction induction, follow on with Kant’s view of logic as an extremely limited system, and culminating with Booles’ introduction of logic as an extensional system, and Russell’s solution to his own paradox.
