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Lund / Copenhagen: CWK Gleerup / Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957. INSCRIBED by the AUTHOR: "with the writer's compliments" but unsigned. From the library of Prof. Alonzo Church. Very Good condition. NOT a library discard. No. 2 in the Library of Theoria series, edited by Ake Petzall. A pioneer work in the logic of preference. From: The Philosophy of Sören Halldén, edited by K. Segerberg and N-E Sahlin: "The contraposition principle -- In On the Logic of Better Sören Halldén defends a principle that says that the better the presence of something is, the worse is its absence.5 If coffee is better than tea, then not-tea is better than not-coffee. Or, to take a more extreme example, if not-cancer is better than not-flu, then flu is better than cancer which on the surface sounds quite reasonable. Halldén s argument in favour of this principle runs as follows: Making a value comparison generally means, not comparing A to B, but rather comparing A without B to B without A. To say that it is better to be a philosopher than to make money, using Aristotle s own examples, is to say that to be a philosopher and not making money is better than to make money and not be a philosopher. Making money and being a philosopher is not considered a possibility." This volume was among several dozen books from Alonzo Church's library that we were lucky enough to purchase at auction in New Jersey. Alonzo Church (1903 - 1995) was professor of mathematics at Princeton University (1929-1967) and of mathematics and philosophy at UCLA (1967-1990). He was the founding editor of the JOURNAL OF SYMBOLIC LOGIC. Among his most influential contributions are Church's Theorem, Church's Thesis, and the Lambda Calculus. His work was of major importance in mathematical logic, recursion theory, theoretical computer science, and functional programming languages in general. Professor Church's creation of lambda calculus was the foundation for the LISP programming language and provided the semantic model for ALGOL. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Church is regarded by many as the greatest American logician of the 20th century. [For more on Church's contributions, see items 250, 251, 321, 394, and 533 in Hook and Norman's ORIGINS OF CYBERSPACE, A LIBRARY ON THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING.] This book doesn't have Alonzo Church's name anywhere, but see our inventory for several other items that do. INSCRIBED by the AUTHOR. First Edition. Softcover. Very Good condition. Illus. by NOT a library discard. 112pp. Great Packaging, Fast Shipping.
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