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Richard Milton Martin

Summary

Richard Milton Martin (12 January 1916, Cleveland, Ohio – 22 November 1985, Milton, Massachusetts) was an American logician and analytic philosopher.

Richard Milton Martin
Born12 January 1916
Cleveland, Ohio
Died22 November 1985 (aged 69)
Milton, Massachusetts
Academic background
EducationHarvard University, Columbia University, Yale University
ThesisA Homogeneous System for Formal Logic. (1941)
Doctoral advisorFrederic Fitch
Academic work
DisciplinePhilosophy, logic
InstitutionsUniversity of Texas, New York University, Northwestern University

In his Ph.D. thesis written under Frederic Fitch, Martin discovered virtual sets a bit before Quine, and was possibly the first non-Pole other than Joseph Henry Woodger to employ a mereological system. Building on these and other devices, Martin forged a first-order theory capable of expressing its own syntax as well as some semantics and pragmatics (via an event logic), all while abstaining from set and model theory (consistent with his nominalist principles), and from intensional notions such as modality.

Life and career edit

Richard Milton Martin was born on January 12, 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio to Frank Wade Martin and Lena Beatrice (Bieder).[1]

From Harvard, where he had studied under Alfred North Whitehead during his last year before retirement,[2] Martin earned an A.B. in 1938.[3]

He then obtained an M.A. from Columbia (1939), and his Ph.D. from Yale (1941).[4] His dissertation, supervised by.logician Frederic Fitch,[2] was on “A Homogeneous System for Formal Logic.”[5][6]

He was an instructor in mathematics at Princeton University 1942–44, then at the University of Chicago 1944–46.[5][3] He then taught philosophy at Bryn Mawr College 1946–48, the University of Pennsylvania 1948–59, the University of Texas 1959–63 and at New York University 1963–73.[5][3] From 1973 until his retirement in 1984 he taught at Northwestern University, Martin also held visiting appointments at Universitact Bonn, Yale, Universitact Hamburg, the New School for Social Research, and Temple University.[5][3]

In 1976, Martin largely retired from teaching (only giving one course per year at Northwestern from then on) becoming a research associate with Boston University Center for the Philosophy and History of Science. He made excellent use of the resulting leisure, so that his final decade of life was by far his most productive, publishing over 100 book chapters and journal articles.[2]

He published what Meguire describes as "the definitive treatment of his logic"[2] within Semiotics and Linguistic Structure (1978). The next year saw the publication of his edited volume of the writings of Carolyn Eisele on Charles Sanders Peirce.[7]

He also helped edit, and contributed chapters to, the Festschriften books The Logical Enterprise (1975)[8] dedicated to Fitch, and Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay (1985).[9] (Having been a colleague of J. N. Findlay at Austin, Texas.)[4]

At the time of his death, Martin served on the editorial board of eight journals and on the advisory board of the Peirce Edition Project. In 1981, he became president of the Charles S. Peirce Society. In 1984, he was elected president of the Metaphysical Society of America, and he delivered their presidential address at Vanderbilt University in March 1985.[10]

Despite having held tenure track appointments from 1948 until his retirement in 1984, the only Ph.D. thesis known to have been completed under Martin’s supervision is that of James Scoggin. Otherwise, Martin’s legacy is coextensive with his published writings.

Martin died at his home in Milton, Massachusetts, on November 22.[11][12]

Ideas edit

"...one of the most many-sided, prolific, and scholarly of analytic philosophers."

—Hans Burkhardt, Foreword to Metaphysical Foundations: Mereology and Metalogic.

Martin was part of the first wave of American analytic philosophers; arguably, only Quine (1908–2000), Fitch (1909–1987), and Henry Leonard (1905–67) preceded him. His chronological elders Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89) were arguably his contemporaries, as they all began their careers in earnest at about the same time, namely right after World War II. Martin's formal treatment of syntax followed Alfred Tarski; of semantics, Rudolf Carnap. Martin was generally well-disposed towards Carnap's work, contributed a long paper to the Schilpp volume on Carnap, and was seen as a disciple. Paradoxically, Martin was a positivist and radical nominalist who also sympathized with process theology and orthodox Christianity.

Between 1943 and 1992, Martin published 16 books and about 240 papers (of which 179 were included in his books) on an extraordinary range of subjects, including aesthetics, logic, the foundation of mathematics, metaphysics, syntax/semantics/pragmatics, the philosophy of science, phenomenology, process philosophy, theology, Frege, and C.S. Peirce. Martin preached and practiced that philosophy should be done formally, by employing first-order logic, the theory of virtual sets and relations, and a multiplicity of predicates, all culminating in an event logic. Starting with the papers reprinted in his 1969 Belief, Martin argued that the Frege's Art des Gegebensein was crucial to his thinking. Just what this Art entailed remains to be elucidated.

Martin was especially fond of applying his first-order theory to the analysis of ordinary language, a method he termed logico-linguistics. He often referenced the work of the linguists Zellig Harris (admiringly) and Henryk Hiz (more critically); Martin, Harris, and Hiz all taught at Pennsylvania in the 1950s. Yet Martin was dismissive of the related theoretical work by Noam Chomsky and his MIT colleagues and students. Ironically, Martin appears to have been Chomsky's main teacher of logic; while a student at Pennsylvania, Chomsky took every course Martin taught.[2]

Quine's Word and Object cites Martin with approval, but Martin's wider impact has not been commensurate with the breadth and depth of his writings; the secondary literature on Martin consists of little more than reviews of his books.

Quotations edit

“Over the portals of the entrance to contemporary philosophy is writ: Enter here fully equipped with the tools of the new logic.” Intension, p. 153.

“God made first-order logic and all the rest is the handiwork of man.” Semiotics, p.xv.

Works edit

The first four titles below and the first part of Semiotics (1978) are monographs. The other titles are fairly loose collections of papers, most first published in journals.

A complete bibliography of Martin's articles published in journals, conference proceedings, and books edited by others can be found in Meguire, Philip, 2005.[2]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Who's who in America. Vol. 2nd (41st 1980-1981 ed.). Chicago: Marquis Who's Who. 1980. p. 2165. ISBN 978-0-8379-0141-1 – via Internet Archive.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Meguire, Philip (1 January 2005). "Richard Milton Martin: American Logician". The Review of Modern Logic. 10 (31): 7–65. Retrieved 24 April 2014 – via Project Euclid.
  3. ^ a b c d Metzger, LInda, ed. (1985). Contemporary authors new revision ser vol 15 a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television. Gale. p. 305. ISBN 978-0-8103-1944-8 – via Internet Archive.
  4. ^ a b Kline, George; Silber, John (1986). "In Memoriam: Richard M. Martin (1916-1985)". The Review of Metaphysics. 39 (3). ISSN 0034-6632 – via JSTOR.
  5. ^ a b c d Anellis, Irving H. (2005). "MARTIN, Richard Milton (1916–85)". In Shook, John R. (ed.). Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960. Thoemmes Press, Continuum.
  6. ^ Martin, R. M. (1943). "A Homogeneous System for Formal Logic". The Journal of Symbolic Logic. 8 (1): 1–23. doi:10.2307/2267976. ISSN 0022-4812 – via JSTOR. A part of the material of this paper was contained in a thesis, of the same title, presented for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Yale University, 1941. The author wishes to thank Professor Frederic B. Fitch for many invaluable criticisms and suggestions...
  7. ^ Dauben, Joseph W. (March 1982). "Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Essays by Carolyn Eisele . Carolyn Eisele, R. M. Martin". Isis. 73 (1): 143–144. doi:10.1086/352961. ISSN 0021-1753.
  8. ^ Anderson, Alan Ross, ed. (1975). The Logical Enterprise. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01790-8 – via Internet Archive.
  9. ^ Cohen, R. S. (Robert Sonné); Martin, R. M. (Richard Milton); Westphal, Merold (1985). Studies in the philosophy of J.N. Findlay. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-87395-795-3 – via Internet Archive.
  10. ^ Martin, R. M. (1985). "On the Metaphysical Status of Mathematical Entities". The Review of Metaphysics. 39 (1): 3–21. ISSN 0034-6632 – via JSTOR.
  11. ^ Anon. (March 1986). "IN MEMORIAM". The Southern Journal of Philosophy. 24 (1). Wiley: 147–147. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.1986.tb00445.x. ISSN 0038-4283. With deep regret we report the death of one of our Editorial Board members, Richard M. Martin, who died at his home in Milton, Massachusetts, on November 22, 1985. Richard Martin published fifteen books and nearly 150 articles ranging over an extraordinarily wide variety of topics and philosophers. ... He was a contributor to many Festschriften including those for Y. Bar-Hillel, Fr. J. M. Bochenski, John N. Findlay, Frederick Fitch, Nelson Goodman, Charles Hartshorne, Sidney Hook, and Paul Lorenzen, and to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Carnap. He was a consulting editor for a number of journals in addition to this one.
  12. ^ Hiż, Henry (1986). "Richard M. Martin †". Kant-Studien. 77 (1–4). De Gruyter: 271–272. doi:10.1515/kant.1986.77.1-4.271. ISSN 0022-8877.
  13. ^ Misiuna, K (3 April 2007). "R, M. Martin, Logical semiotics and mereology. (Foundations of Semiotics, 16.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia:John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1992, xiii + 282pp. $79 DM150". History and Philosophy of Logic. 16 (1): 134–36. doi:10.1080/01445349508837245. ISSN 0144-5340. The book .., is a collection of essays .. that ... may be read separately. What is characteristic of Martin's philosophy, and ... exposed here, is an opposition to set theory. Martin argues that set theory is to be rejected because of its excessive ontic commitment, and replaced by a theory ... able to provide foundations for mathematics avoiding dubious assumptions ... This conviction takes the form of a philosophical programme ... to be accomplished ... by a quite original theory ... known as ordinal mereology (OM) or omogeneous logic (HL), where only individuals are admitted as values for variables. Sets and classes, excluding virtual classes and relations which may be regarded as a façon de parler, are to be gratuitous entities, since 'the only entities that should be needed are those that are needed überhaupt in science and elsewhere; the admission of sets is at best an ad hoc device within mathematics alone' (p. 134).

References edit

  • Meguire, Philip, 2005, "Richard Milton Martin: American Logician," Review of Modern Logic 10: 7–65. (Open access download).

Further reading edit

  • Martin, Elisabeth Puckett (1987). Deacon John Burnham of Ipswich and Ebenezer Martin of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, with Some of Their Descendants. Baltimore: Gateway Press. pp. 286–293 – via Internet Archive.

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