Abstract

This text, serving as an introduction to Aristotelian, symbolic, inductive, and practical logic, presents the techniques of these approaches to logic, some of the philosophical problems of logic, and some of the attempts to solve philosophical problems by means of various logical techniques. It discusses the problem of universals and null classes; briefly introduces the theory of types; and presents Lukasiewicz's formalization of Aristotelian syllogistic logic as an example of a formal system. Classical logic and propositional logic are carefully and fully presented. The text, however, is weak in its presentation of quantificational logic. After a correct, but brief and very inadequate introduction to quantificational logic, the readers are referred to Quine, Methods of Logic, or to Copi, Symbolic Logic, for a more adequate development. The chapter on inductive logic discusses the uses and dangers of generalizations and introduces the probability calculus; the chapter on informal logic discusses criteria of rationality and presents the usual informal fallacies. There are problems and exercises after many of the sections, and answers in the back of the book.—R. L. S.