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Recommendations of logic text books

andrewk March 01, 2019 at 23:01 4550 views 5 comments
This thread is for people to post their recommendations of introductory logic textbooks. It is quite common for site members to want to develop skills in formal logic, to brush up on faded skills, or to deepen and broaden the skills they have. It would be good if some good paths towards that could be pointed out.

Please post recommendations in this thread. If you can provide any additional info, eg on distinguishing features of the text or why you liked it, that would be great.

Comments (5)

Nicholas Ferreira March 02, 2019 at 07:52 #260842
"Introduction to Logic", Irving M. Copi. - It was the very first logic book I read. It's kinda old, and treat some subjects like basic logic, language, definitions, fallacies, arguments, validity, syllogism, symbolic logic, natural deduction, inference rules, propositional functions, quantifiers and induction. It has a lot of exercicies, with the answer in the end of the book.
"Introduction to Logic", Harry Gensler - Newest, this book has a more didatic approach, and contains everything that Copi's has, and relations; identity, modal, deontic, imperative and belief logic; metalogic and a logical formalization and deduction of the golden rule of ethics.
"Introdução à Lógica", Cezar Mortari - The author of this book is brazilian, so it's written in portuguese, and I don't know if there is an english version of it, but maybe some lusophone is reading this and I hope it will be useful. It's a very technic book, with precise definitions. It contains almost everything that Gensler has, except for deontic, imperative and belief logic and the ethics formalization, and it has a basic arithmethic theory formalized, something about axioms system and other things.
"Introduction to mathematical logic", Elliott Mendelson. - I didn't read this book yet, but i heard about and people say it's a good book to start studying math logic.
alan1000 May 16, 2019 at 02:23 #289760
Bertrand Russell, An Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy.

The definitive introduction to Peano arithmetic and set theory. In this book you will find (for example) proof that an infinity may be less than some natural number.
Shawn May 26, 2019 at 08:39 #292393
Hi,

I'm looking for a good book on QML. Any suggestions welcome.
bert1 May 26, 2019 at 09:34 #292396
Beginning Logic, E.J Lemmon

Intro to formal logic.
I enjoyed the exercises.
Zosito May 27, 2019 at 00:15 #292504
Introduction to Formal Logic by Peter Smith. Covers the basics, from propositional logic to first order logic. Instead of using natural deduction, it focuses on more mechanical proof techniques (such as tableau method)

How to Prove it by Daniel Velleman. Gives a brief introduction to propositional and first order logic. Doesn't delve much into formal logic; it's geared more towards people who need to learn how to prove math theorems.