Elementary Logic

Rating:
Summary: The Best Introductory Textbook of Logic
Review: I am surprised to be the first one to write a review about this book. However, I can see how this happened - the author himself writes in his preface to this last edition: "Publisher's samples of fifty-five logic textbooks have accumulated in my office, all introductory and in English. Quantification theory or the first-order predicate calculus is covered in one way or another in most of them. Forty years ago it was covered in none." Forty years ago W. O. Quine published his "Elementary Logic" and set some standards in Logic. I would only want to stress the fact that the good thing about this book is not only that it was the first of this kind, chronologically speaking, but that it still is the first, from a logical point of view (this is the title of another one of Quine's books). Usual readers may not realize that the standards that Quine set forty years ago are still the best that one can find in his attempt to learn Logic. I haven't read a better introductory textbook of Logic and I recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand how the Science of all Sciences (as the medieval philosophers called Logic) works.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Introductory Textbook of Logic
Review: I am surprised to be the first one to write a review about this book. However, I can see how this happened - the author himself writes in his preface to this last edition: "Publisher's samples of fifty-five logic textbooks have accumulated in my office, all introductory and in English. Quantification theory or the first-order predicate calculus is covered in one way or another in most of them. Forty years ago it was covered in none." Forty years ago W. O. Quine published his "Elementary Logic" and set some standards in Logic. I would only want to stress the fact that the good thing about this book is not only that it was the first of this kind, chronologically speaking, but that it still is the first, from a logical point of view (this is the title of another one of Quine's books). Usual readers may not realize that the standards that Quine set forty years ago are still the best that one can find in his attempt to learn Logic. I haven't read a better introductory textbook of Logic and I recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand how the Science of all Sciences (as the medieval philosophers called Logic) works.