The Dialogical Roots of Deduction

Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Professor of Philosophy and University Research Chair at VU Amsterdam, and Professorial Fellow at Arché (University of St Andrews). She is the author of Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories (2007) and Formal Languages in Logic (Cambridge, 2012), and is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (with Stephen Read, Cambridge, 2016).

• Preface; Part I. The Philosophy of Deduction: 1. The trouble with deduction; 2. Back to the roots of deduction; 3. The Prover-Skeptic dialogues; 4. Deduction as a dialogical notion; Part II. The History of Deduction: 5. Deduction in mathematics and dialectic in Ancient Greece; 6. Aristotle's syllogistic, and other ancient logical traditions; 7. Logic and deduction in the Middle Ages and the modern period; Part III. Deduction and Cognition: 8. How we reason, individually and in groups; 9. The ontogeny of deductive reasoning; 10. The phylogeny of deductive reasoning; 11. A dialogical account of proofs in mathematical practice; Conclusions.

'The Dialogical Roots of Deduction displays a formidable command of an impressive range of sources from ancient and mediaeval logic to the latest work in cognitive science. The depth of Catarina Dutilh Novaes's scholarship is evident throughout as she defends a novel and provocative thesis: that deduction as dialogue is conceptually and historically prior to its conventional monologue presentation. I expect the book to be influential and widely discussed.' Andrew Aberdein, Florida Institute of Technology