There are few authors of the nineteenth century whose contribution to analytical philosophy was as substantial as Bolzano's. A meticulous and original critic of Kant's epistemology and an eminent predecessor to Frege and Husserl, his logical theories offered insightful and systematic analysis of key semantic notions. Bolzano's notions of logical consequence and analyticity anticipated with great acuity the views of Tarski and Quine. His account of a priori knowledge, which he developed in stark opposition to the Kantian doctrine of pure intuition, rests on an understanding of knowledge by virtue of meaning that shows a penetrating grasp of the nature of deductive knowledge. Bolzano's Theoretical Philosophy is the first book in English to offer a survey of Bolzano's philosophy of logic and theory of knowledge and is intended for anyone with an interest in the history of analytical philosophy.
Description:
There are few authors of the nineteenth century whose contribution to analytical philosophy was as substantial as Bolzano's. A meticulous and original critic of Kant's epistemology and an eminent predecessor to Frege and Husserl, his logical theories offered insightful and systematic analysis of key semantic notions. Bolzano's notions of logical consequence and analyticity anticipated with great acuity the views of Tarski and Quine. His account of a priori knowledge, which he developed in stark opposition to the Kantian doctrine of pure intuition, rests on an understanding of knowledge by virtue of meaning that shows a penetrating grasp of the nature of deductive knowledge. Bolzano's Theoretical Philosophy is the first book in English to offer a survey of Bolzano's philosophy of logic and theory of knowledge and is intended for anyone with an interest in the history of analytical philosophy.