Nicolai Alexandrovich Vasiliev (russian: Николай Александрович Васильев), also Vasil'ev, Vassilieff, Wassilieff (December 31, 1940), was a Russian

logician Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the pre ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or w ...

. He was a forerunner of paraconsistent and

multi-valued logic Many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) refers to a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values (i.e., "true" and "false ...

Early years

Vasiliev was born on June 29 O.S., 1880 in

Kazan Kazan ( ; rus, Казань, p=kɐˈzanʲ; tt-Cyrl, Казан, ''Qazan'', IPA: Help:IPA/Tatar, ɑzan is the capital city, capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. The city lies at the confluence of the Volga and t ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...

. His father, Professor Alexander V. Vasiliev, was a fairly well known mathematician, his grandfather was the outstanding sinologist Professor Vassily P. Vasiliev, and his great grandfather was the prominent astronomer Ivan M. Simonov, who was a close colleague of

Nikolai Lobachevsky Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky ( rus, Никола́й Ива́нович Лобаче́вский, p=nʲikɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ ləbɐˈtɕɛfskʲɪj, a=Ru-Nikolai_Ivanovich_Lobachevsky.ogg; – ) was a Russian mathematician and geometer, ...

. Wanting to be a psychologist, Vasiliev studied at the medical faculty and the historico-philological faculty of Kazan University (1906), where he was offered the position of privat-dozent in 1910. As a university student, Vasiliev was enthusiastic about symbolist style poetry and published some books of verses of his own (for example,''"The longing for eternity"'') and translations of the poetry of

Emile Verhaeren Emil or Emile may refer to: Literature *'' Emile, or On Education'' (1762), a treatise on education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau * ''Émile'' (novel) (1827), an autobiographical novel based on Émile de Girardin's early life *'' Emil and the Detecti ...

and

Algernon Charles Swinburne Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as '' Poems and Ballads'', and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition ...

Work in logic

Although Vasiliev outlined an abstract to the article on the "logic of relatives" by

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for ...

as early as in 1897, it was only in 1908 that he entirely devoted himself to logic. On May 18, 1910 Vasiliev presented a lecture (published in October that same year) ''"On Partial Judgements, on the Triangle of Opposites, on the Law of Excluded Third"'' in which he put forward for the first time ever the idea of (non-Aristotelian) logic, free of the laws of excluded middle and

contradiction In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's ...

. Reasoning by analogy with the "imaginary" geometry of Lobachevsky, Vasiliev called his novel logic "imaginary", for he assumed it was valid for the worlds where the above-mentioned laws did not hold, worlds with beings having other types of sensations. He distinguished levels of logical reasoning, and introduced the notion of metalogic. Vasiliev spent 1912-13 in

Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...

(mostly

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...

) and published his salient works ''"Logic and Metalogic"'' and ''"Imaginary (non-Aristotelian) logic"''. Vasiliev constructed non-Aristotelian logic using the concepts, and even the manner of reasoning, common to

Aristotelian logic In philosophy, term logic, also known as traditional logic, syllogistic logic or Aristotelian logic, is a loose name for an approach to formal logic that began with Aristotle and was developed further in ancient history mostly by his followers, ...

. He was aware of the achievement in mathematical logic (and even carefully studied Ernst Schröder's works) but did not make an attempt to formalise "imaginary" logic. His only work in a foreign language (English) - a concise abstract of his "imaginary logic" - was published in

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adm ...

in 1924.

Late years

In 1914, when

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

broke out, Vasiliev was drafted into the army, where he became seriously

mentally ill A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitt ...

. Nevertheless, he returned to teaching at Kazan University, but in 1922 was forcibly retired by the new

Bolshevik The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...

administration. This act aggravated his ailment: Vasiliev spent most of the following 20 years in a mental hospital, thus rescued from the

Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...

regime. He died on December 31, 1940. The place where he was buried is unknown. The pioneer ideas of Vasiliev were rediscovered in the early 1960s by Vladimir Smirnov, and formed a basis mainly for

paraconsistent logic A paraconsistent logic is an attempt at a logical system to deal with contradictions in a discriminating way. Alternatively, paraconsistent logic is the subfield of logic that is concerned with studying and developing "inconsistency-tolerant" syst ...

. Some well-known scholars in the 1960s considered his work to be the precursor of

. The informal style and conceptual riches of Vasiliev's works make them especially valuable. In 2012 an international conference on Vasiliev's work was held in Moscow where a number of important modern paraconsistent logicians contributed.

Bibliography

; Works * Vasiliev, N.A., ''Imaginary Logic''. Moscow, Nauka, 1989 (in Russian). . * Vasiliev, N.A., ''Logic and Metalogic'' translated by V.L. Vasyukov, in ''Axiomathes'', IV (1993). n. 3, pp. 329–351. * Vasiliev, N.A., ''Imaginary (non-Aristotelian) Logic'', translated by R. Vergauwen and E. A. Zaytsev, in ''Logique et Analyse'', 46 (2003), n. 182, pp. 127–163. * Vasiliev, N.A., ''Logica Immaginaria''. Roma: Carocci, 2012 (Italian translation of all the logical writings) . ; Studies * Arruda, A.I. The Survey of Paraconsistent Logic. In: Mathematical logic in Latin America/ Eds. Arruda A.I., Chuaqui R., Da Costa N.C.A., Amsterdam: New York: Oxford. North-Holland, 1980, pp. 1–41. * Bazhanov, V.A. ''N.A. Vasiliev'' (1880 – 1940). Moscow, Nauka, 1988 (in Russian). * Bazhanov, V.A
''The Fate of One Forgotten Idea: N.A.Vasiliev and His Imaginary Logic''
In: Studies in Soviet Thought, 1990, vol.39, N3-4, pp. 333–334 * Bazhanov, V.A. Charles Peirce’s Influence on Logical Ideas of N.A. Vasiliev. In: Modern Logic, 1992, vol. 3. N 1, pp. 48–56 * Bazhanov, V.A. The Origins and Emergence of Non-Classical Logic in Russia (Nineteenth Century until the Turn of the Twentieth Century). In: Zwischen traditioneller und moderner Logik. Nichtklassiche Ansatze. Mentis-Verlag, Paderborn, 2001, S.205 – 217. * Bazhanov, V.A. ''History of Logic in Russia and the USSR''. Moscow, Kanon+, 2007 (in Russian). * Bazhanov, V.A. ''N.A. Vasiliev and His Imaginary Logic. Restoration of One Forgotten Idea''. Moscow, Kanon+, 2009 (in Russian).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vasiliev, Nicolai Alexandrovich 1880 births 1940 deaths Russian logicians Mathematicians from Kazan 20th-century Russian mathematicians 20th-century Russian philosophers Kazan Federal University faculty