A brief history of negation

The history of scholarship on negation tracks and illuminates the major developments in the history of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle through Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein to contemporary formal theorists. Our perspective focuses on the catalytic role played by the 20th century philosopher of language Paul Grice, whose views on negation serve as a fulcrum for his attempt to bridge the (neo-)Traditionalist and Formalist traditions in logical thought. Grice's remarks on negation and speaker meaning and the elaboration of his ideas by subsequent neo-Griceans are summarized and situated within a broader picture of the role of contradictory and contrary negation in the frameworks of Aristotelians, Medievals, early modern schoolmaster-logicians, 19th and early 20th century neo-Idealists and Formalists, Oxford ordinary-language analytics, practitioners of classical and non-classical logics, and a range of other philosophers and linguists. Particular attention is paid to the relations between negation and the other operators of propositional and predicate calculus. Implications for accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language are also pursued and extensive references to related work are provided.