Edwin Mares

Professor
BA(Hons) McM PhD Indiana

Profile

Ed received his BA(Hons) from McMaster University and his PhD from Indiana University. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Automated Reasoning Project at The Australian National University and taught at Dalhousie Univesity and University of Victoria before coming to Victoria University.

Ed has been head of the philosophy department (when there still were departments at Victoria) and is currently coordinator of graduate studies. Ed used to be the reviews editor for Studia Logica and now is on the Consulting Board of Past Editors for that journal.

Ed is a founding and current member of Victoria's Centre for Logic, Language and Computation.

Research Areas

Ed's main research areas are logic and the philosophy of logic. His main interest over the past decade is in developing and finding a philosophically satisfying interpretation of relevant logic. The fruits of his labours in this area can be found in his book, Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The central idea behind relevant logic is that there needs to be a tighter connection in arguments considered valid than we find in many arguments that are deemed valid by standard (or 'classical') logic. For a brief and relatively non-technical introduction to relevant logic, see Ed's entry on it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
 
Ed is also working on projects in paraconsistent logic. Paraconsistent logics are logical systems that do not allow the derivation of every formula from every contradiction. These logics are useful in formalizing theories of how people do or should reason about fictional stories, scientific theories, and their own beliefs.
 
From time to time, Ed returns to the engrossing but very difficult field of the philosophy of probability. He is extremely interested in the problem of the interpretation of probability statements as they are found in scientific theories such as quantum mechanics, but he has made little headway on this.
 
Together with Stuart Brock, Ed is writing a book on the debate between realists and anti-realists in metaphysics.

Current Teaching

Ed teaches a variety of courses on logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and ethics. Currently he is teaching part or all of the following:

PHIL 402 Logic
PHIL 318/418 Philosophy of Science
PHIL 311 Logic
PHIL 111 Introduction to Logic
PHIL 104 Argument and Analysis
PHIL 106 Contemporary Ethical Issues

Selected Publications

Books

(with Stuart Brock), Realism and Anti-Realism (Stocksfield UK: Acumen, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007)

Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Articles

"Information, Negation, and Parconsistency" given at the Fourth World Congress on Paraconsistency, Melbourne, July 2008 PDF

"General Information in Relevant Logic" Synthese (forthcoming) PDF

"Relevance and Conjunction" Journal of Logic and Computation (forthcoming) PDF

"A General Semantics for Quantified Modal Logic" (with Rob Goldblatt) Advances in Modal Logic, London: College Publications, 2006 PDF

"An Alternative Semantics for Quantified Relevant Logic" (with Rob Goldblatt) The Journal of Symbolic Logic 71 (2006) 163-187 PDF

'''Four-Valued' Semantics for the Relevant Logic R" Journal of Philosophical Logic 33 (2004) pp 327-341
 
"A Paraconsistent Theory of Belief Revision" Erkenntnis 56 (2002) pp 229-246
 
"The Incompleteness of RGL" Studia Logica 65 (2000) pp 315-322
 
"A Star-Free Semantics for R" Journal of Symbolic Logic 61 (1995) pp 579-590

Book Chapters

'Semantic Dialetheism' in Graham Priest, JC Beall, and Brad Armour-Garb (eds), The Law of Non-Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2004)

(with Andre Fuhrmann) 'Conditionals' in Ross Brady (ed.), Relevant Logics and their Rivals, Volume II (Ashgate, 2003)

'Relevance Logic' in Dale Jacquette (ed.), Companion to Philosophical Logic (Blackwell, 2002)

(with Robert K. Meyer) 'Relevant Logics' in Lou Goble (ed.), Guide to Philosophical Logic (Blackwell, 2001)