Nuel Belnap on indeterminism and free action / / edited by Thomas Müller.

• Superior document: Outstanding Contributions to Logic,
• HerausgeberIn: Müller, Thomas.
• Place / Publishing House: Cham : : Springer International Publishing :, Imprint: Springer,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: 1st ed. 2014.
• Language: English
• Series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic, 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (vi, 411 pages) :; illustrations.

This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher. Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can seem far apart, but in Belnap’s work, they are intimately linked. This book explores their philosophical interconnectedness through a selection of original research papers that build forth on Belnap’s logical and philosophical work. Some contributions take the form of critical discussions of Belnap's published work, some develop points made in his publications in new directions, and others provide additional insights on the topics of indeterminism and free action. In Nuel Belnap’s work on indeterminism and free action, three formal frameworks figure prominently: the simple branching histories framework known as "branching time;" its relativistic spatio-temporal extension, branching space-times; and the “seeing to it that” (stit) logic of agency. As those frameworks provide the formal background for the contributed papers, the volume introduction gives an overview of the current state of their development. It also introduces case-intensional first order logic (CIFOL), a general intensional logic offering resources for a first-order extension of the mentioned frameworks and a recent research focus of Belnap’s. The volume also contains an extended biographical interview with Nuel Belnap.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The many branches of Belnap’s knowledge; Müller, Thomas -- Decisions in branching time; Bartha; Paul -- Internalizing case-relative truth in CIFOL+; Belnap, Nuel -- A stit Logic Analysis of Morally Lucky and Legally Lucky Action Outcomes; Broersen, Jan -- Worlds Enough, and Time: Musings on Foundations; Brown, Mark -- Open Futures in the Foundations of Propositional Logic; Garson, James W -- On Saying What Will Be; Green, Mitchell -- The Intelligibility Question For Free Will: Agency, Choice And Branching Time; Kane, Robert -- What William of Ockham and Luis de Molina would have said to Nuel Belnap: A Discussion of some Arguments Against “The Thin Red Line”; Øhrstrøm, Peter -- Branching for general relativists; Placek, Tomasz -- Some examples formulated in a `seeing to it that' logic: Illustrations, observations, problems; Sergot, Marek -- In Retrospect: Can BST models be reinterpreted for what decisions, speciation events and ontogeny might have in common?; Strobach, Niko -- Theory of Possible Ancestry in the Style of Nuel Belnap’s Branching Space-Time; Pleitz, Martin and Strobach, Niko.-Connecting Logics of Choice and Change; van Benthem, Johan and Pacuit, Eric -- Intentionality and Minimal Rationality in the Logic of Action; Vanderveken; Daniel -- Group Strategies and Independence; Xu, Ming -- Interview with Nuel Belnap.