Customer Reviews

The Development of Logic

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

 

 

A colossus of a book with an enourmous treasury of information! Sure, as some of the other reviewers have complained, it's not equally strong on every logician or epoch, but who could reasonably expect that?

A definite must read for any student of logic, not only because it is packed with interesting information and illuminating exposition but also because many sections are quite engagingly written. In addition to being surprisinlgy suitable for "cover to cover"-reading the massive index enables one to use it as a historic encyclopedia of logic.

Very strong on Frege, although because it was written in 1962,it cannot reflect the ample scholarship of the past 40 years.

Meticulous about the logic of the classical era. Deprecates

Lukasiewicz's attempt to formalize the syllogism (Arthur Prior's Formal Logic does a better job on this technical topic.)

They do NOT do justice to how Leibniz is the most exciting logician between Aristotle and Boole.

Good on Boole, because Wm Kneale contributed importantly to the postwar Boole revival.

Slights the important contributions of Charles Sanders Peirce, although again, his importance has become much clearer since this book was written.

Surprisingly lukewarm about Principia Mathematica.

Fairly clear about topics (eg, recursive arithmetic) other texts make difficult.

A major flaw is K&K's silence about Whately's Logic of 1826. This book , which went into many editions over nearly 100
years, was instrumental in the revival of logic in the English speaking world. Reading Whately made logicians out of De Morgan, C S Peirce, William Hamilton.
For the history of logic after 1840 or so, K&K is superseded by Grattan-Guiness's The Search for Mathematical Roots.

This is an impressive book; it is inexpensive and easy to read. This book was written by philosophers with a broad knowledge of classical logic and terminology. You will find many Latin quotations in the book and if you need the translations of the quotations you have to look them up in an appendix. The first half of the book is heavy on Greek and medieval logic while the second half is centered around the questionable culmination point of modern logic: Frege, Russel, Whitehead and Wittgenstein. In the index you will find seven references to Wittgenstein, but none to Bayes, Bernoulli or Cox. This is a clear bias, typical for Anglo-American philosophers. To my astonishment, I found that all references to publications in German (by Frege, Abel, Gödel, Tarski, Skolem) where spelled correctly even with Umlaut-characters. A doubtful achievement.

What disappointed me most was the ignorance toward modern logic. Probabilities are almost non-existent in this book (although they have been addressed by Laplace, the Bernoullis, Bayes and Gauss centuries ago). Furthermore temporal logic is missing completely, even in the index. This is most astonishing since Arthur Prior (an important figure in temporal logic) is mentioned in the Preface for having read the complete manuscript before publication. Multi-valued logic is summarized in the final chapters but Fuzzy logic is missing (since it was not yet invented at the time of first publication in 1962).

Although the content of this book deserves five stars, I have to

say something about the manufacture by the Oxford University Press.

The quality of book's workmanship is really low, the OUP should do

better that this. The one star is for the quality of the manufacture.