Margaret MacDonald (1907MacDonald ( -1956 was a central figure in the history of early analytic philosophy in Britain due to both her editorial work as well as her own writings. While her later work on aesthetics and political philosophy has lately received attention, her early writings in the 1930s present a coherent and, for its time, strikingly original blend of common-sense and scientific philosophy. In these papers, MacDonald tackles central problems of philosophy of her day: verification, the problem of induction, and the relationship between philosophical and scientific method. MacDonald's philosophy of science starts from the principle that we should carefully analyze the elements of scientific practice (particularly its temporal features) and the ways that scientists describe that practice. That is, she applies the techniques of ordinary language philosophy on actual scientific language. MacDonald shows how "scientific common-sense" is inconsistent with both of the dominant schools of philosophy of her day. Bringing MacDonald back into the story of analytic philosophy corrects the impression that in early analytic philosophy, there are fundamental dichotomies between the style of Moore and Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and the Vienna Circle on the other.

In the first book of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle sets out, for the first time in Greek philosophy, a logical system. After this, Aristotle compares this method with Plato’s method of division, a procedure designed to find essences of natural kinds through systematic classification. This critical comparison in APr I.31 raises an interpretive puzzle: how can Aristotle reasonably juxtapose two methods that differ so much in their aims and approach? What can be gained by doing so? Previous interpreters have failed to show how this comparison is legitimate or what important point Aristotle is making. The goal of this paper is to resolve the puzzle. In resolving this puzzle we not only learn more about the relationship between division and the syllogistic in Aristotle. We will also learn something about the motivation for the syllogistic itself, by seeing the role that it plays in his philosophy of science.

How does Aristotle think about sentences like 'Every x is y' in the Prior Analytics? A recently popular answer conceives of these sentences as expressing a mereological relationship between x and y: the sentence is true just in case x is, in some sense, a part of y. I argue that the motivations for this interpretation have so far not been compelling. I provide a new justification for the mereological interpretation. First, I prove a very general algebraic soundness and completeness result that unifies the most important soundness and completeness results to date. Then I argue that this result vindicates the mereological interpretation. In contrast to previous interpretations, this argument shows how Aristotle's conception of predication in mereological terms can do important logical work.

What, exactly, is puzzling about induction? While the so-called problem of induction is normally introduced through David Hume’s famous argument, this essay shows how Sextus Empiricus gets to the heart of the matter. When properly understood, Sextus’ argument shows how the very power of inductive reasoning—its ability to move from particulars to universals—is at the same time what makes it “totter.” The argument has only been analyzed in any detail by the formal learning theorist Kevin Kelly, who uses the formal tools of computability theory and topology to mount a principled response. It is shown that this response depends on questionable assumptions and thus that they have not resolved Sextus’ riddle of induction.

The aim of this paper is to show how Outlines of Pyrrhonism II constitutes an original, ambitious, and unified skeptical inquiry into logic. My thesis is that Sextus’ argument in Book II is meant to accomplish both its stated goal (to investigate the topics typically grouped together by dogmatists under the heading of “logic”) and an unstated goal. The unstated goal is, in my view, interesting in itself and sheds new light on Sextus’ methodology. The goal is: to suspend judgement on the effectiveness of dogmatic methodologies.