The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley Book

This was somewhat different from what I had expected. I thought it might be an overview of different logics with an accompanying philosophical discussion of their differences and possible justifications. In a way, this is exactly what it is, but not in the form I had anticipated.

For starters, there is almost no symbolic presentation of the different logics in this book, not even for the basic connectives for conjunction, disjunction, implication and so on. They are all presented fairly formally, but non-symbolically. I'm sure there is some pedagogical principle that in the mind of the author justified this choice and I'm not sure I disagree with the decision; too much formality can be off-putting, at least in an introductory text; but at times this makes the expression of arguments and conclusions overly long and confusing, at least some basic symbols should have been deployed.

Another thing that surprised me was that while the book deals with several different logics, it has no sign of a systematic presentation of these logics and their relation to each other. Instead, the structure of the book is mainly based on different philosophical problems arising from not only logic but also language and metaphysics with an attempt at addressing the problems through logical analysis. In this attempt, new systems of logic are presented as attempts to deal with the problems. The resulting discussion is very well presented in a sometimes heavy historical fashion with descriptions of how and when the different logics were invented and the back-and-forth between prominent philosophers on the best way to address the problems with logic (along with the author's own views), but there is something in the way this is done that confused me a bit.

On the one hand there is, as I said, no systematic approach to presenting the logics and discussing their properties in relation to each other, so it is not primarily a book on the philosophy of logics (if my use of this term is acceptable, I am an amateur after all). One could say therefore that it is more of a book on philosophical logic (meaning here, the application of logic in philosophy) and a discussion of "the right" or at least "best" way of understanding logical concepts such as implication (there author seems to take a stance against logical pluralism without ever making this explicit). On the other hand, there is no systematic approach to dealing with philosophical applications of logic either. There is no attempt to give an overview of the different areas in which philosophers try to use formal logic to solve philosophical questions.

This confusion of mine likely stems from a not very thorough understanding of either logic, philosophy of logic, nor philosophical logic (or even a good grasp of the distinction between the latter two), but a confusion it has caused me nonetheless and it is a confusion of not seeing any clear focus in the book.

That being said, it was a great and informative read with only occasional slightly heavy technical details that could be overlooked without missing the "big picture". It gave an overview of some discussion concerning some basic logical concepts and it did a good job of it.