Tracking Reason: Proof, Consequence, and Truth - Hardcover

Tracking Reason introduces exciting new ideas and proposes original and sophisticated solutions to difficult philosophical problems. Any reader interested in the philosophy of logic, language, or mathematics will no doubt benefit from Azzounis careful and detailed development of these views. (Mathematical Reviews)

In many ways, Tracking Reason resembles Jody Azzounis previous book, Deflating Existential Consequence. The subject matter of each lies at the interface of metaphysics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language. The style is both entertaining and clear. The positions argued for are so controversial as to sound almost insane. And yet the arguments provided are illuminating, and manage to make the positions seem almost like common sense. (The Philosophical Review)

Americans want everyone to have access to decent health care―yet in an era of rising economic inequality, our country is moving ever further from that ideal. Healthy, Wealthy, and Fair asks why this has happened, and illuminates the way forward. The arguments assembled here are not timid. Many readers will heartily agree. Others will demur. But all will be enlightened and engaged. (Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, Harvard University and author of The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy)

Healthy, Wealthy, and Fair makes crystal clear what many have felt and feared: that the nation's growing concentration and mal-distribution of wealth, besides breeding greater political inequality, financial corruption and money worship, also strikes at the health, physical well-being and life expectancy of less advantaged Americans. (Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich)

When ordinary people - mathematicians among them - take something to follow (deductively) from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof.