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Topoi (2013) 32:301303DOI 10.1007/s11245-013-9160-4
Bernard Bolzanos Wissenschaftslehre
Johan van Benthem
Published online: 21 April 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
We live in an academic world where mass-producing books has become the norm, and even young authors feel that their unripe thoughts, jotted down below the age of 50, deserve a volume, an artistic cover, and a professional publicity machine supplied by a mega-factory like Elsevier or Springer. But every now and then, a real book appears that stands out, and Wissenschaftslehre (or in the English translation that will appear close on its heels, Theory of Science) is denitely one of these. The author Mr. Bernard Bolzano is an unusual character. He is a philosopher of religion, but endowed with an original mathematical mind whose acute observations have already attracted the attention of major scientists: it is rumored that his name may soon be attached to a basic theorem capturing the essential continuity of the real number line. But this book is surely his masterpiece, collecting the thoughts of a lifetime on logic and methodology of science. And just as the best beer is produced today, not in mega-factories, but in micro-breweries, this book is published by a local bookseller in a Bavarian country town, showing the continuing sparkle and tenacity of intellectual life outside of The Matrix of modern universities and their academic-industrial complex.
Simply put, the book is a breath of fresh air in an overheated stuffy room. In this review, I will focus on Mr. Bolzanos thoughts about logic, even though he offers much more than that to readers interested in theory of science and general philosophy. Modern logic has become more and more technical, cutting itself loose from its
broader origins as the study of reasoning, and philosophers of logic slavishly play up to this trend by devising ever more arcane criteria of logicality that apply only to a small elite of logical constants, making it harder and harder for new themes to enter the eld. Refreshingly, Mr. Bolzano does none of this. He resolutely ignores received wisdom in logic textbooks, and deftly avoids entanglement in the scholasticism of our modern age. Instead, he just goes back to what logic is about, and rethinks it afresh.
Let me start with...