Leibniz on Reasoning about Impossible Concepts

5 pages•Published: May 25, 2019

Abstract

Leibniz wrote down a proof for the existence of God accompanied by a note on im- possible concepts. A possibly true contradiction is quite unusual and not compatible with mainstream logic or his “Theodicy”. His example of such a contradiction about an impossible concept, the “square circle”, is still popular in contemporary metaphysics. Similar examples make the proposition of contradiction and possible truth controversial. An alter- native formalization approach avoids contradictions by using a description logics extension to a different kind of concept composition.

Keyphrases: concept composition, description logics, impossible concept, multi modal logic

In: Christoph Benzmüller, Xavier Parent and Alexander Steen (editors). Selected Student Contributions and Workshop Papers of LuxLogAI 2018, vol 10, pages 27-31.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/FWDH
	https://doi.org/10.29007/jnml

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{LuxLogAI2018:Leibniz_Reasoning_about_Impossible,
  author    = {Lukas Grätz},
  title     = {Leibniz on Reasoning about Impossible Concepts},
  booktitle = {Selected Student Contributions and Workshop Papers of LuxLogAI 2018},
  editor    = {Christoph Benzmüller and Xavier Parent and Alexander Steen},
  series    = {Kalpa Publications in Computing},
  volume    = {10},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2515-1762},
  url       = {/publications/paper/FWDH},
  doi       = {10.29007/jnml},
  pages     = {27-31},
  year      = {2019}}

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