If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic

by Michael Shenefelt, Heidi White

While logical principles seem timeless, placeless, and eternal, their discovery is a story of personal accidents, political tragedies, and broad social change. If A, Then B begins with logic's emergence twenty-three centuries ago and tracks its expansion as a discipline ever since. It explores where our sense of logic comes from and what it really is a sense of . It also explains what drove human beings to start studying logic in the first place.

Logic is more than the work of logicians alone. Its discoveries have survived only because logicians have also been able to find a willing audience, and audiences are a consequence of social forces affecting large numbers of people, quite apart from individual will. This study therefore treats politics, economics, technology, and geography as fundamental factors in generating an audience for logic―grounding the discipline's abstract principles in a compelling material narrative. The authors explain the turbulent times of the enigmatic Aristotle, the ancient Stoic Chrysippus, the medieval theologian Peter Abelard, and the modern thinkers René Descartes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alan Turing. Examining a variety of mysteries, such as why so many branches of logic (syllogistic, Stoic, inductive, and symbolic) have arisen only in particular places and periods, If A, Then B is the first book to situate the history of logic within the movements of a larger social world.

If A, Then B is the 2013 Gold Medal winner of Foreword Reviews ' IndieFab Book of the Year Award for Philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Logic, History, Nonfiction, Mathematics

352 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2013

Reviews

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is logic?

It is impossible to answer, for explaining logic you have to use logic in the first place. And yet, as mysterious as it is, we need logic more than anything else to live in this world.

A beautiful book: fun, passionate, and well written. It speaks about logic: about the history of logic, about the history of the world, about how logic impregnates everything from politics to psychology; and how, when we think logically, our vision of these matters changes.

Even the notes are just right, not too many, and interesting by themselves.

Highly recommended.

[Sher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable and very interesting. And, both authors teach Great Books at N Y University's Liberal Studies program," so the book has a very strong humanities flavor. Logic is explained as being a response to various social, economical, and political forces. The authors review these forces and highlight in depth various important figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Martin Luther, Jeremy Bentham, Abelard, and more. In addition to showing the relationship of computers to logic, and ends with a section on faith and logic -- a discussion of the tensions between the two. Though the book contains syllogisms and If As then Bs, the book is mostly about the cultural forces that caused particular kinds of reasoning.

[Amine Amari · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب جميل يدور موضوعه حول بدايات المنطق واكتشافه ووضع قوانينه في اليونان القديمة والظروف والأوضاع التي امتاز بها الاغريق عن بقية الشعوب والحضارات والتي ساهمت في أن يكون لهم قصب السبق في ذلك.
كذلك لا يخلوا من بعض الأبواب المفيدة في استخدام الأدوات المنطقية وإن كانت موجهة للمبتدئين وغير المتخصصين.
والكتاب يتابع تطور النظريات المنطقية بداية من السفسطة ثم المنهج السقراطي فالمنطق الصوري الأرسطي، أي منطق القضايا (الحملية)، ثم الرواقيون ومنطق الموجهات وتقديمهم للشرطية، ثم القفز نحو النهضة الأوروبية وديكارت وبيكون كالعادة دون المرور بقرون من استخدام المنطق في العالم الاسلامي، رغم الذكر الخجول والقصير جدا لذلك في بضع فقرات. وهدا عيب روح المركزية الأوروبية في الكتابات الأكاديمية للأسف.

[Alejandro Velasco · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a decent book but it falls short for a lot of what it intends to deliver. Embedded within the intention of showing "how the world discovered logic" you will find the authors' own views on a wide range of matters. It's not a crime, but it's confusing when they jump from a historical explanation to their own ideas and all of that is condensed in less than a page.

There's an interesting effort to show a link between the study of logic and some historical processes, but here and there you'll find hypotheses that are controversial to say the least. For instance, the authors claim that the exclusion of women from the Athenian assembly was related to ancient weapons (which were big and heavy, so only men could handle them properly) which in turn made war and hence politics a men-only task. Not a single study was cited to support such a claim.

Some interesting philosophical questions and theories are explored throughout the book, but some thinkers' positions are misrepresented (their description and criticism of Wittgenstein's insight on philosophical problems is as arbitrary as it gets), a lot of arguments are insufficiently explained (they get rid of the problem of induction in just a page) and several philosophical views are discarded on extremely weak grounds.

And, as you'd expect with just any book written by anglophones that addresses ambiguity and vagueness, Shenefelt and White go for —oh, how refreshing!— Derrida and Foucault. Interestingly enough (I guess?), there's a bunch of references to religious matters that I didn't find as relevant as the authors do.

Also, if a chapter's footnotes are about 1/3 the length of the chapter itself, maybe try to figure out how to make them shorter, include them in the main text or just get rid of them. It was a torture to read that many notes, some of which were annoyingly unnecessary.

I tried to use this book for my lectures on the history of logic. A couple chapters are fine, but I won't encourage anyone to make this book their first option if they want to dive into the history of logic.