Customer Reviews

Thinking About Logic: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic (OPUS)

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

 

 

Stephen Read is a great philosopher and logician, and he shows in this book that logic is philosophically <em>alive</em>. There's lots of insight in this book, and it's an ideal companion for anyone who is learning logic at a university level and who has a niggling feeling that not everything is as clear-cut as it's sometimes taught.

The book is wide ranging, with excellent chapters on conditionality, truth, vagueness, names and non-referring terms. My upper level logic students love it, and my intro students use it to see where logic can take them and why it's such an interesting field. Read it!

I checked this book out of the library to do a basic review of intuitionistic vs. classical logic. It was so readable and so useful, I had to buy a copy of my own. Undergrad students often balk at some of the assumptions they meet in introductory logic classes. What, for instance, is the rationale behind the truth values for material implication? Why is every proposition either true or false? Why can we reason from a double-negation to the affirmative? If you are familiar with classical logic already, this book is an extremely accessible introduction to long-standing debates among professional logicians.

This book is one of the best I have read on the philosophy of logic. The best chapters are 1, 2, and 3 on truth, logical consequence, and conditionals. The author espouses moderate realism, a commonsense approach. He reviews the existing scholarship on topics before proffering his own well-reasoned opinions.

Most modern basic logic texts go off a cliff in accepting bizarre definitions of validity and truth conditons for conditional propositions. Most explain that conditional propositions can be treated as truth functional material conditionals. Read corrects these errors.

I have only recently run across this little introduction to the philosophy of logic. Read raises and discusses many of the problems that professional logicians argue about. His language is accurate and precise. One needs to have at least an elementary introduction to logic to comprehend what he is saying. I believe those who have given the book low reviews have mistakenly believed that this is an introduction to Logic. It is an Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic, a much more abstract and foundational subject.

Read discusses excellently the relationship of ordinary language and logic, the concepts of truth, logical consequence, possible worlds, paradoxes, sorites, relevance, etc. He surveys problems with Conditionals, Constructivism, etc. And he is obviously knowledgable on all of these areas. At the end of each chapter he has a few pages of anotated bibliography referring the reader to the best sources and discussions of the issue.

I am recommending this book as supplemental reading to my logic students. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

This book, while being an, 'Introduction' is not at all that. The author has little command of the English language and, while he does have great knowledge regarding the philosophy of logic, is unable to communicate it in a method capable of actually introducing a beginner to the world of logic. The Tractatus makes more sense than this maze of jargon.

Try as i might, the content of this book was both confused and confusing. I cannot bring myself to recommend this tragedy of a monograph - especially in relation to its handling of the "strengthened liar paradox" which showed a blatent disregard for other work in the field, and Read throughout appears to overlook some of the more important issues - one such example being the dismissal of global relativism in a mere sentence. The book cannot justify it's claim to being an "introduction" to logic, and continually presupposes a knowledge of complex philosophical argument deeming it unsuitable for the uninititiated. Even for those adept enough to comprehend it's concepts, the writing is disjointed and uninformative, with poor examples.

I would therefore recommend only that others look elsewhere for more accurate and readable material.