John N. Martin

John N. Martin is an American philosopher and logician. He is McMicken Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. His research has focused on formal semantics, the history of logic, many-valued logic, philosophical linguistics, ancient and medieval logic, early modern logic, and environmental ethics. His work on the Port-Royal Logic has been discussed in scholarly reviews in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic, and Metascience.

Early life and education

Martin was born in San Francisco, California. He received an A.B. in philosophy from the University of California, Davis in 1968, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1970, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1973.

His doctoral dissertation, completed under the direction of Bas van Fraassen, was titled Sortal presupposition: a study of category mistakes, their logic and importance. The book was reviewed by Stephen D. Spangehl in the journal Language in 1989.

Port-Royal Logic

Martin has written extensively on the Port-Royal Logic, the seventeenth-century logic text by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. His published work on the topic includes studies of existential import, distributive terms, truth, privative negation, the structure of ideas, and extension in the Port-Royal Logic.

His monograph The Cartesian Semantics of the Port Royal Logic was published by Routledge in the series Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.

Selected publications

Books

Articles and chapters

Selected articles and chapters

"A Syntactic Characterization of Kleene's Strong Connectives with Two Designated Values." "Facts and the Semantics of Gerunds." "A Many-Valued Semantics for Category Mistakes." "The Concept of the Irreplaceable." "Facts and Events as Semantic Constructs." "Negation, Ambiguity, and the Identity Test." "Epistemic Semantics for Classical and Intuitionistic Logic." "The Semantics of Frege's Grundgesetze." "A Tense Logic for Boethius." "Order Theoretic Properties of Holistic Ethical Theories." "Existence, Negation, and Abstraction in the Neoplatonic Hierarchy." "Should Logic Satisfy the Humanities Requirement." "Aristotle's Natural Deduction Reconsidered." "Proclus and the Neoplatonic Syllogistic." "Łukasiewicz's Many-Valued Logic and Neoplatonic Scalar Modality." "All Brutes are Subhuman: Aristotle and Ockham on Privative Negation." "The Lover of the Beautiful and the Good: Platonic Foundations of Aesthetic and Moral Value." "A History of Satisfiability," with John Franco.

"Existential Import in Cartesian Semantics." "Existential Commitment and The Cartesian Semantics of the Port Royal Logic." "Distributive Terms, Truth, and The Port Royal Logic." "Malebranche's Neoplatonic Semantic Theory." "Privative Negation in The Port Royal Logic." "The Structure of Ideas in The Port Royal Logic." "A Note on 'Distributive Terms, Truth, and The Port Royal Logic'." "Extension in The Port Royal Logic."