Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence

✍ Scribed by Peter Øhrstrøm, F. V. Per Hasle (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 424
• Series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 57
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field. The book studies the rich contributions from ancient and medieval philosophy up to the downfall of temporal logic in the Renaissance. The modern rediscovery of the subject, which is especially due to the work of A. N. Prior, is described, leading into a thorough discussion of the use of temporal logic in computer science and the understanding of natural language.
Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence thus interweaves linguistic, philosophical and computational aspects into an informative and inspiring whole.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Introduction: Logic and the study of time....Pages 1-5
Front Matter....Pages 6-9
The sea-fight tomorrow....Pages 10-14
The master argument of Diodorus Cronus....Pages 15-32
The study of tenses in the middle ages....Pages 33-38
Temporal ampliation....Pages 39-42
The duration of the present....Pages 43-51
The logic of beginning and ending....Pages 52-64
Time and consequentia....Pages 65-70
Temporalis — the logic of ‘While’....Pages 71-86
Human freedom and divine foreknowledge....Pages 87-108
The downfall of medieval tense-logic....Pages 109-113
Logic as a timeless science....Pages 114-117
Front Matter....Pages 118-121
The 19th century and Boolean logic....Pages 122-127
C.S. Peirce on time and modality....Pages 128-148
Łukasiewicz’s contribution to temporal logic....Pages 149-154
A three-point structure of tenses....Pages 155-166
A.N. Prior’s tense-logic....Pages 167-179
The idea of branching time....Pages 180-196
Tense logic and special relativity....Pages 197-202
Some basic systems of temporal logic....Pages 203-215
Front Matter....Pages 118-121
Four grades of tense-logical involvement....Pages 216-230
Metric tense logic....Pages 231-240
Front Matter....Pages 241-242
Two paradigms of temporal logic....Pages 243-256
Indeterministic tense logic....Pages 257-269
Leibnizian tense logic....Pages 270-281
Tense logic and counterfactual reasoning....Pages 282-302
Logic of durations....Pages 303-319
Graphs for time and modality....Pages 320-343
Temporal logic and computer science....Pages 344-365
Conclusion....Pages 366-372
Back Matter....Pages 373-412

✦ Subjects

Logic; Computer Science, general; Theoretical Languages; Philosophy of Science