Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology

by Dale Jacquette (Editor)

This volume provides a comprehensive collection of classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of logic.

Genres: Philosophy, Logic, Nonfiction

387 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2001

Reviews

[Micah Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot from the papers in this anthology, but it's really not what it advertises itself to be. It says it should be accessible to students who have taken a first course in symbolic logic, and I really have to disagree with that. It's true of some of the papers, but quite a few of them use a lot of special notation that the aforementioned such students will balk at. It's also a pretty heavy philosophic lift, more fitted to graduate-level study. And some of it makes essential reference to a substantial amount of outside material, like Gōdel's comments on Russell and Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica." Not having studied "Principia," I barely followed what he was talking about. There are also an unfortunate number of typos, including typesetting errors in the logical symbols, which may interfere with the comprehension of those less seasoned in the material.

In the other Blackwell philosophy anthologies I've read, the papers within each section were nicely selected so that they complemented each other, each building on the previous one, but in this anthology it's kind of half that and the other half a grab bag of sorts. I did appreciate the inclusion of some nonstandard views such as Anderson and Belknap's spirited attack on the material conditional. In fact, I probably learned the most from the section on logical consequence. I guess I also appreciated that it's not terribly long or exhaustive but has some worthwhile material on important topics.

[Lulu]

Logic anthology