10 Facts About Richard Sylvan

Richard Sylvan studied at Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand, and then Princeton University, before taking positions successively at several Australian institutions, including the University of Sydney.

Richard Sylvan died on 16 June 1996 of a massive heart attack.

Richard Sylvan was instrumental in the development and study of relevance logic.

In 1972, Richard Sylvan proposed semantics for certain relevant logics that had been developed by American philosophers Nuel Belnap and Alan Ross Anderson.

Priest in turn influenced Richard Sylvan; they met in 1976 at the Australasian Association of Logic conference in Canberra at a time when Richard Sylvan was doing novel work on dialetheism, the view that some contradictions are true.

Not long after meeting Priest, and then investigating a logic capable of handling such true contradictions, Richard Sylvan endorsed the view.

Richard Sylvan's studies ranged over a variety of topics in logic and the philosophy of logic.

Richard Sylvan wrote important papers on free logic, general modal logic, and natural deduction systems.

Outside of logic and metaphysics, Richard Sylvan was a proponent of so-called deep environmental ethics in the study of environmental ethics.

From his work in environmental ethics, Richard Sylvan took an interest in anarchism, contributing an often-cited entry on the subject to A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy.