Customer Reviews

A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive

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

 

 

The book itself, of course, gets a full 5 stars. Mill's work represents some of the first fundamental progress to be made on inductive logic and probabilistic reasoning and, as such, underlies much of modern scientific methodology and machine learning. He was also an excellent writer, and his prose is a pleasure to read.

However, be aware that this edition (A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, University Press of the Pacific) is a "facsimile" of the 1891 edition, featuring incredibly small type (8pt Times, approximately) in an odd two-column layout. The text quality is poor (by normal standards), and it is quite a strain to read for extended periods. The publisher's blurb in the book claims its goal is to "make original editions of historical works available to scholars at an economical price," and that the text in this edition has been digitally enhanced. I doubt it. The text looks no better than the 1933 printing I was able to obtain from the university library. While I can see the value of having a "historical" edition, I have to believe that most scholars would prefer a critical edition that they can read without a magnifying glass.

It's very unfortunate that the only two editions available of this great work are of such poor print quality. The other edition (with the purple cover) is even worse than this one, in my opinion, and I had to return it due to cropped-off text on the left margins. I'm also not sure why a "facsimile" needs to cost 40 dollars; this is very discouraging. The text of Mill's work is in the public domain, so you would think someone could offer a good, cheap printing. Naturally, one can find the full text online, but who can read a 600-page book online? Not me.

So, all told, it's a great work by a great author. And I guess this edition is your best bet until something better comes along, although it does a disservice to a great thinker who should be more widely appreciated.

Amazon.com apparently lumps the reviews of all editions of A System of Logic in with each other. Most printings of this work look like they've been Xeroxed out of a century-old book, and are thus a huge pain to read. But this one (from The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, published by Liberty Fund, Inc.) is different: the margins are normal-sized, there are no inky blotches, and there's a single column per page. If there's a better printing of A System of Logic available for purchase, I haven't come across it.

Some complaints have been registered about the size of the type in the print edition. Clearly this is not an issue with the Kindle version.

This volume was a surprising -- even astonshing -- find or me, because it is at once a complete edition of one of the most important works in modern philosophy of science and it is a particularly well executed Kindle book to boot.

For the price, I was expecting a Project Gutenberg .TXT file stove-piped into a Kindle file. (I find such things unreadable, regardless of the fact that they are free.) This text, however, is a true Kindle book with active table of contents, dynamic formatting WRT to the selected font size, and hyper-linked footnotes. Being a Kindle text, you can annotate to your heart's desire, so this is a genuine study text for working scholars, whether in or out of academia.

One odd note of no particular significance: when one chooses the "goto" function from the menu, the table of contents is not one of the choices that comes up. I've seen that in a few other kindle books as well, so this was not a particular shock. The TOC is fully active, and a vitally useful tool for tracking elements of Mill's argument, so it is worthwhile to simply bookmark that point thereby making it instantly accessible whenever you need to refer to it.

For anyone interested in classics of Western philosophy, this is an essential addition to your Kindle library, made all the more exceptional by the quality of its formatting.