About The Author

Richard Bradshaw Angell
Born: October 14, 1918, Bronxville, N.Y.

EDUCATION:

B.A, 1940, Swarthmore College, M.G.A., 1948,
Univ.of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. 1954,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University June, 1989
Professor, Dept of Philosophy, Wayne State University 1968-89
Chairman, Wayne State Philosophy Department - 1968-73, 75-77
Ohio Wesleyan University, Asst Professor to Professor 1954-68
Wells College, 1962-64, Washington & Jefferson College, 1953-54
Wheaton College (Norton, MA), 1952 Florida State University, 1949-51

Amer. Philosophical Assn, Assn for Symbolic Logic

A LOGIC, (pp 658 +xxi), University Press of America, 2002
REASONING AND LOGIC, (pp. 625+xiv), Appleton Century Crofts, New York, l964
"A Propositional Logic with Subjunctive Conditionals", Journal of Symbolic Logic, l962
"The Geometry of Visibles", Nous, 1974
"Truth functional Conditionals and Modern, vs.Traditional, Syllogistic", Mind, 1986;
For a more complete list Link to:
     Richard Bradshaw Angell at Wayne State University
     Also see PHILOSOPHY at Wayne State University

     At Swarthmore College I developed a high respect for scholarship with a sense of social responsibility. After graduation I worked for a year in social work then entered the Fels Insitute for State and Local Government at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. I planned to go into politics and work for a better world.
     Pearl Harbor got the United States into World War II and I volunteered in the Medical Corps. By the time I was released in 1946 I had become convinced that I did not have the right temperament for politics. What interested me most were philosophical problems of knowledge and ethics. I wanted to develop logical ways of approaching ethical problems. I applied for graduate work in Harvard's Philosophy Department.
     At Harvard I quickly found that the new rigorous logic developed by Frege, Russell and Whitehead was a logic of truth. It offered little for a logic of ethics. From my first exposure to it, the concept of "if ... then" in Russell's logic seemed inadequate despite its rigorous employment. I became intrigued by the problem of how to reconcile rigor and revelance. I read William James and John Dewey on what is relevant to human purposes and the Early Wittgenstein, Carnap, C. I. Lewis and Quine on the importance of rigor and logic. My Ph. D. dissertation in 1954 was entitled "Language, Designata and Truth; a Prolegomena to a Pragmatic Rationalism".
     While teaching at Ohio Wesleyan I had two National Science Foundation grants for work on subjunctive conditionals. I developed a system which, however, was not good enough. At Wayne State University I studied efforts by others to extend standard logic to include deontic logic and the logic of better and worse. I found that those systems had problems and "paradoxes" carried over from standard logic. In theory of knowledge I have held the view that pragmatists were right in trying to shift the focus of philosophers away from questions of ultimate truth to the ways in which ideas and concepts (and systems of logic) are used and useful for human purposes. But I believed pragmatists were wrong in altering the meaning of "truth" and ignoring the developments in modern logic. A common sense correspondance concept of truth is pragmatically an extremely usable and useful concept. In A-LOGIC I present such a concept of truth and a logic of truth-statements based on it. This truth-logic is presented as an extension of the underlying "analytic" logic based on synonymy and containment of meanings. Validity is not defined by truth-values (as in standard mathematical logic). Rather, it is defined by relationships between meanings of premisses and conclusion. This leaves room for an independent logic of value judgments that is not an extension of a truth-logic.
     A-LOGIC is the result of 40 years of persistent effort to find a rigorous logic that is 1) free of the anomalies of Principia Mathematica's logic, 2) can handle subjunctive and contrary-to fact reasoning in science, common sense and ethics and 3) serves the pragmatic goal of improving peoples' capacity to reason clearly on questions about what is right as well as on questions of truth. It prepares the way, but is far from completing a satisfactory logic for arguments in ethics.