Customer Reviews

The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is NOT an introduction to philosophical logic. If you have not had ample exposure to formal logic or mathematical reasoning this book will likely be out of your reach (I would recommend that you start with Gensler's "Introduction to Logic", take a couple courses in Calculus and then tackle this book). For those with the requisite background this work offers a direct, concise rendering of the various subfields of formal philosophical logic including propositional logic, predicate calculus, Godel's Theorem, Fuzzy Logic, Modal Logic, Deontic Logic and much more. The text stresses rigour, so its paragraphs are dense with definitions and symbols. There are no excercises and, as such, this book is best used as a reference. This book is highly recommended for anyone with a solid background in formal logic who is looking for a broad collection of essays to explain the philosophical implications of various systems of formal logic.

There is a brief and probably terse-for-most introduction to classical first-order logic by Hodges. It spans 23 pages, so it's expected. However, if you have some formal training, e.g. from an introductory course on predicate logic, many of the articles in the book won't be too tough. Some of them seem surprisingly advanced (e.g. the ones on intuitionist logic, many-valued logics, and relevant logics, respectively), either because the authors are being thorough or unnecessarily complicated. It is apparent when they are guilty of one rather than the other (or both for that matter). E.g., the intuitionist article is just thorough, and the introduction of combinators in the relevant logics chapter doesn't fit for this sort of introduction to the subject (though the rest of it is quite good).

Otherwise, most of the chapters are accessible and very good introductions to various areas of philosophical logic with the added bonus of containing decent bibliographies and "Suggested further readings" at the end of each. A quick look at the introduction reveals that the list of contributors are currently at the forefront of their respective fields. It is one of the better anthologies on philosophical logic available, especially for the price.

Good survey of various interesting topics. Highlight is certainly a superb and enthralling chapter on incompleteness by Raymond Smullyan. He has some great and thought-provoking puzzles, and some very minimal descriptions of incompleteness, first and second.

For some of the other chapters, I would have preferred a clearer discussion of the exact deep theorems. Thus, the epistemic and modal discussions seemed a bit definition-heavy.

Maybe it's me, but I find the reverse subset symbol for implication less clear than the double arrow one. Not sure why they use the former.

Would have preferred more on probability, although there is one chapter. Notably missing is a discussion of fuzzy logic. Maybe quantum logic would have been helpful too.

Valuable reference.