It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as weIl as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics in logic'. We are confident that the second edition will prove to be just as good! The first edition was the second handbook published for the logic commu nity. It followed the North Holland one volume Handbook 0/ Mathematical Logic, published in 1977, edited by the late Jon Barwise. The four volume Handbook 0/ Philosophical Logic, published 1983-1989 came at a fortunate temporal junction at the evolution of logic. This was the time when logic was gaining ground in computer science and artificial intelligence circles. These areas were under increasing commercial pressure to provide devices which help and/or replace the human in his daily activity. This pressure required the use of logic in the modelling of human activity and organisa tion on the one hand and to provide the theoretical basis for the computer program constructs on the other.

This volume may be of interest for all those who wish that philosophy had a scientific character. As an adherent of the Polish Lvov-Warsaw Philosophical School, the author of this collection of papers endeavours to clarify some basic notions of epistemology, ontology and psychology of cognitive acts, such as judgment, existence, being etc. In his investigations he refrains from unnecessary rejection of common-sense knowledge but at the same time searches for suitable patterns in contemporary sciences. Regarding formal logic as a fundamental tool for the precise expression and justification of thoughts, the author tries to clear logic from ontological commitments, shows how to construct logic of norms and how to use safely different definitions in research works. The book presents a new conception of antinomies and an innovatory approach to realistic epistemology. Moreover, some applications of logical methods are illustrated by examples of semantical analyses of the general notion of similarity and the biological concept of homology.

This book is the first of two volumes devoted to the work of Theo Kuipers, a leading Dutch philosopher of science. Philosophers and scientists from all over the world, thirty seven in all, comment on Kuipers' philosophy, and each of their commentaries is followed by a reply from Kuipers. The present volume focuses on Kuipers' views on confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation, as laid down in his From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (Kluwer, 2000). In this book, Kuipers offered a synthesis of Carnap's and Hempel's confirmation theory on the one hand, and Popper's theory of truth approximation on the other. The key element of this synthesis is a sophisticated methodology, which enables the evaluation of theories in terms of their problems and successes (even if the theories are already falsified), and which also fits well with the claim that one theory is closer to the truth than another. Ilkka Niiniluoto, Patrick Maher, John Welch, Gerhard Schurz, Igor Douven, Bert Hamminga, David Miller, Johan van Benthem, Sjoerd Zwart, Thomas Mormann, Jesús Zamora Bonilla, Isabella Burger & Johannes Heidema, Joke Meheus, Hans Mooij, and Diderik Batens comment on these ideas of Kuipers, and many present their own account. The present book also contains a synopsis of From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. It can be read independently of the second volume of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, which is devoted to Kuipers' Structures in Science (2001).