Abstract

About the 1930’s there was in Harvard University a group of young American philosophers including Quine, Frankena, Henle, Stevenson, Goheen, Goodman, Isenberg and Leonard. This volume is dedicated to the last named. It is appropriately titled, The Logical Way of Doing Things, for the main activating force in Leonard’s work was the new mathematical logic, and he was one of the first American philosophers who urged the application of logic to non-mathematical areas and who believed in the enormous power and utility of formal language for philosophical enquiry. Nelson Goodman points out: ‘Nowadays it is hard to realize how novel symbolic logic was then. Few American Universities had any courses at all in the subject, and of the two main undergraduate courses in logic, one was concerned with traditional Aristotelian logic, while the other, taught by Lewis in Sheffer’s absence, covered parts of the Survey of Symbolic Logic and of the first volume of Principia Mathematica. Those who went further were largely self-taught’.