Richard Sylvan
| Richard Sylvan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 December 1935 Levin, New Zealand |
| Died | 16 June 1996 (aged 60) |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
|
Main interests
|
Logic, metaphysics, environmental ethics |
|
Notable ideas
|
Relevance logic, deep ecology |
Richard Sylvan (13 December 1935 – 16 June 1996) was a philosopher, logician, and environmentalist.
Sylvan was born Francis Richard Routley in Levin, New Zealand, and his early work is cited with this surname. He studied at Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand (now Victoria University of Wellington), and then Princeton University, before taking positions successively at several Australian institutions, including the University of Sydney. From 1971 until his death in Bali, Indonesia, he was a fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Sylvan was married to the philosopher/environmentalist Val Routley (later, Val Plumwood), with whom he worked closely for twenty years before their separation in 1982. After his divorce from Plumwood, he married Louise Sylvan (née Mirlin) in 1983 and adopted the last name Sylvan (an English word meaning "of the forest") to reflect his love of the forest and commitment to environmentalism.
Sylvan was instrumental in the development and study of relevance logic. In 1972, Sylvan (in a paper co-authored with Plumwood) proposed a semantics for certain relevant logics that had been developed by American philosophers Nuel Belnap and Alan Ross Anderson. Together with Robert K. Meyer, Routley turned this into a semantics for a large number of logical systems. Their work in logic work helped make ANU a center for the study of non-classical logic in general. Routley's work had particular influence for Graham Priest, a well-known proponent of non-classical logic; Sylvan and Priest edited a well-regarded volume on the topic. Priest in turn influenced Sylvan; they met in 1976 at the Australasian Association of Logic conference in Canberra at a time when Sylvan was doing novel work on dialetheism — the view that some contradictions are true. Not long after meeting Priest, then investigating a logic capable of handling such true contradictions, Sylvan also endorsed the view.
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