Customer Reviews

Deduction: Introductory Symbolic Logic

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This is an excellent modern or formal logic text. I would recommend this for a beginning or intermediate modern logic couse. The prose is clear, direct, and economic. It is well-written. Superb definitions and examples. The paperback version is extremely affordable for students. The text covers: validity and natural deduction, quantification, identity and necessity. It even delves into deontic logic (obligation) and counterfactuals. The system used here is commensurable with Kalish and Montague. I highly recommend it.

I am a graduate student in philosophy (AOS in logic) and I teach introductory symbolic logic on a fairly regular basis. This text is superb for that purpose. The definitions are well-formulated, and allow for rigorous informal reasoning based on them. There are many good exercises. Unlike many introductory logic books (e.g. Klenk) the more "challenging" exercises are not simply complicated for the sake of being complicated--they typically can be used to bring to light some interesting logical fact. The natural deduction system is intuitive, and proof-theoretically relatively nice to talk about (if one is inclined to make brief diversions into the metatheory) since it consists of introduction and elimination rules for each connective (as opposed to e.g. the motley of rules one gets in Copi). Given that this book also delves into a variety of extensions and revisions of classical logic, it could be a natural choice for a logic sequence beginning with classical logic and moving to other systems.