Paul M. Livingston’s scientific contributions

In The Logic of Being, Paul Livingston examines the relationship of truth and time from a perspective that draws on Martin Heidegger’s inquiry into the question of being, as well as twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language and logic. In his influential earlier work The Politics of Logic, Livingston elaborated an innovative “formal” or “metaformal realism.” In the Logic of Being, he now extends this concept into a “temporal realism” that accounts for the reality of temporal change and becoming while also preserving realism about logic and truth. Livingston employs a formal and phenomenological method of analysis to articulate and defend a position of realism about being, time, and their relationship, on which all of these are understood as structured and constituted in a way that does not depend on the human mind, consciousness, or subjectivity. This approach provides a basis for new logically and phenomenologically based accounts of the structure of linguistic truth in relation to the appearance of objects and of the formal structure of time as given. Livingston draws on philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Davidson and Heidegger in this exploration of truth and time. In it, readers and scholars will discover innovative connections between Continental and analytic philosophy. © 2017 by the Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.