Obligations and Prohibitions in Talmudic Deontic Logic
14 Pages Posted: 6 Mar 2012
Date Written: March 6, 2012
Abstract
This paper examines the deontic logic of the Talmud. We shall find, by looking at examples, that at first approximation we need deontic logic with several connectives: OT A Talmudic obligation, FT A Talmudic prohibition, FDA Standard deontic prohibition, ODA Standard deontic obligation. In classical logic one would have expected that deontic obligation OD is definable by – ODA ≡ FD¬A and that OT and FT are connected by – OT A ≡ FT¬A.
This is not the case in the Talmud for the T (Talmudic) operators, though it does hold for the D operators.We must change our underlying logic.We have to regard {OT , FT } and {OD, FD} as two sets of operators , where OT and FT are independent of one another and where we have some connections between the two sets. We shall list the types of obligation patterns appearing in the Talmud and compare Talmudic Logic with modern deontic logic.
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