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Application of Automated Theorem-Proving to Philosophical Thought: Spinoza’s Ethics

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 424))

Abstract

We have applied the automatic theorem-prover Prover9 to prove first eleven theorems of Part 1 of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics. We have used a previous formalization of that segment developed by Blum and Malinovich. We have found Prover9 to be very efficient, providing proofs in tens of miliseconds. It appears that the only, but fundamental, limitation for testing philosophical reasoning is related to the difficulty of unique formalization.

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References

  1. Prover9. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~mccune/prover9/manual/2009-11A/. Accessed 20 Dec 2016

  2. Spinoza, B., Ethics, E.: Translation from Latin. In: Elwes, R.H.M. (ed.) The Chief Works of Benedict De Spinoza. Dover Publications, New York (1951)

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  4. Blum, A., Malinovich, S.: A formalization of a segment I of Spinoza’s Ethics, Metalogicon. VI, 1 (1993)

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  5. Hasan, O., Khan Afshar, S., Tahar, S.: Formal analysis of optical waveguides in HOL. In: Berghofer, S., Nipkow, T., Urban, C., Wenzel, M. (eds.) TPHOLs 2009. LNCS, vol. 5674, pp. 228–243. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-03359-9_17

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Correspondence to Arkadiusz Orłowski .

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© 2017 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Janowicz, M., Ochnio, L., Chmielewski, L.J., Orłowski, A. (2017). Application of Automated Theorem-Proving to Philosophical Thought: Spinoza’s Ethics . In: Kim, K., Joukov, N. (eds) Information Science and Applications 2017. ICISA 2017. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 424. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4154-9_59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4154-9_59

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-4153-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-4154-9

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