My Philosophical Inspirations

So due to the fact that I have had 3 wives and 4 sons to support, coupled with the desire to work in industry rather than academia, I have had to put my true passion of thinking machines on a back burner for nearly 25 years now, but since I am nearing retirement and limited financial stability I will begin to research this subject more frequently in the years until I pass.

This post is more a collection of authors who have influenced my thinking on this subject so if someone were to read some of my writings on this subject in the future, they will have a better understanding of where I am coming from and what/who has influenced my thinking in this area.

I guess the first book, which I basically stumbled upon over 30 years ago in the FAU library which got me started was by Russell and Whitehead and I believe it was called 'Mathematical Logic'.  From there I read a paper by, I believe David Robinson on the 'Theory of Resolution' (since Prolog was en vogue at the time for these sorts of things though my work at the time was done in LISP) and another by Putnam and Davis which I can't recall the name of, but each of these were too technical for me to understand and so I moved on to Alonzo Church and Lambda Calculus.

I then took a formal logic class with which I was extremely dissatisfied (Perch Charts and such) so from there I read 'Many Valued Logic' by Nicholas Rescher and then I advanced to different writings by Frege (more centering on his discssions of concepts rather than his formal mathematical work) and many texts on set and group theory. I revisited Russell, and I did some basic research on modal (especially temporal) logic which brought me to A.N. Prior and indirectly to Kripe's work regarding modal logic (the information if I recall was scant at best as was Prior's) and then I read Wittgenstein. Perhaps no one author has had a more profound influence on me than Wittgenstein, though McTaggart's Paradox and related writings by Q. Smith, Oaklander, etc fascinated me as I had not given the concept of time that much thought when considering formal systems and thinking machines. One last thing, is that since my mentor at the time was Marty Solomon from FAU and he was developing a system called Peirce based on the American philosopher, I also have been influenced (especially on the topic of concepts) by him also.

That pretty much sums it up. I mean I have read a bunch on formal math (Pascal, Euler, Galois, etc) and formal systems (Aristotle, Augustine, Mills, Turing) when needed but my true passion has always been on the intersection between philosophy, reality and mathematical logic and now that I am moving on to my system of contextual concepts (from my system of idiomatic conceptualization) I will lean heavily on Wittgenstein, Frege and anyone else I happen to uncover.

So to sum it up, I am a believer that reality is a very personal (Wittgenstein), difficult to share experience which will lend itself to a fuzzy (Frege) exchange at best, when an attempt to formalize that exchange (Church) is made. I believe a great starting point is many valued truth (Rescher) and modal systems (Krupke/Prior). So now, if you were to read my writings you would know where they are coming from. These authors and their works represent my foundational base and my philosophical inspirations.