where to start with logic? rec books
Where to start with logic? rec books
Austin James
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Ryan Collins
What do you mean by logic?
Aristotelian logic? Hegelian logic? Occam's logic? Husserl's logic? Frege's Logic?
Camden Stewart
no philosopher in particular. Isn't it the case that most universities have general introductory units on logic? I'm after something more broad, I guess classical logic would fit that description?
Grayson Clark
Well, if you want to be Yea Forums at modern logic then you must learn Chad rules of inference Before virgin Truth table in propositional logic
John Harris
Henry Reyes
no offense but this guy seems like an imbecile
Zachary Diaz
Retard, valuations are semantical notions and rules of inference proof theoretic. Logic threads are always full of retards who haven't done any logic
Tyler Allen
while I have you here berating this fellow, can you recommend any useful resources I can utilise?
Ian Lee
Logic is one of those things like "Economics" that it's normal to assume must be universal and universally teachable because it's such an elemental concept. In reality capital-E Economics departments in universities are full of insane cultists who take a bunch of arbitrary shit on faith a priori without even realizing they're doing so. The same is true of capital-P Philosophy departments and people learning "logic."
Like said, there are many different sorts of logic. The classic, scholastic logic many people think of when they think of logic was almost certainly a distortion of the original Aristotelian logic, which was probably never intended by Aristotle to be the ground of an "Aristotelian system" of metaphysics. Even then, medieval logic isn't monolithic. The first logic boom of the 11th century with figures like Anselm and Berengar, based on only a few available Aristotelian texts, is very different from the 13th century boom of Aquinas' generation, which had access to the full Aristotelian corpus. And this is very different from the nominalistic revolutions logic of the 14th century onwards. Things only get more complex from there, and with the renaissance and early modern period, which see an explosion in availability of the classical texts, there is no agreement on what logic is or what its importance is. There are retrenched neo-Aristotelians, extreme nominalists "tradition" of using only to deflate the claims of metaphysics goes back to the 11th century, humanists who think a philosophy of language informed by literature eclipses logic, weird innovators and popularizers like Ramus, and a whole lot of people who simply associate logic with Aristotelian metaphysics and associate both of those things with bullshit taught by the schools.
By the time you get to the 18th century, there is no one tradition or understanding of logic. The categories and terminology of Kant's "pure" logic come vaguely from the background assumptions of the Wolffian rationalist tradition he was a part of, as do Hegel's with some adjustments. Kantian and Hegelian pure or transcendental logic have little to do, at least in their intent, with the 19th century revival in logic with figures like Bolzano, J.S. Mill, Herbart, etc., who could be anything from hardcore Platonists to naive realists and radical empiricists. That's not even to factor in the enormous growth of mathematical philosophy in the 19th century, which was deeply interested in logic and the question of logic's relation to math, but confused as all fuck about method, metaphysics, epistemology.
David Harris
If you mean modern logic, in the sense the average Philosophy undergrad intends, you basically mean logic as it began to be formalized according to the preferences of the generation of mathematicians and philosophers who lived at the end of the ultra-confused 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. For whatever reason, the total fucking chaos ca. 1880-1930 of overlapping Platonists, anti-Platonists, tacit Platonists who loudly claimed they weren't Platonists, "neo-Kantians" (whose "movement" can't be defined by any stable set of criteria, as it includes radical hermeneuticists, transcendental phenomenologists, scientistic empiricists, actual formal Kantians, et al.), "positivists" whose theories of knowledge-acquisition about the world were based on completely unclarified and/or naive ontologies of mind and world, etc., was briefly conducive to the synthesis of philosophical interests that became the short-lived movement of logical positivism, which dissipated within a decade. The key figures here are people like Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, plus the "Vienna school" of logical positivists. For all their varied interests, some of the common concerns of this period were:
- to formalize a symbolic logical meta-language so as to be perfectly rigorous and transparent, and thereby avoid the messiness and vagueness of regular language
- to thereby allow for apodictic (i.e., self-evidently and ineluctably certain) philosophy, i.e., philosophy as a progressive set of nested and correlated proofs (it's in this sense that logical positivism is indebted to rationalism, like phenomenology and mathematical intuitionism becomes clear)
- to ground math in this sort of logically purified language, showing that the truths of math are apodictic
- to thereby repudiate "psychologism," a term confusingly used in a hundred different ways by a thousand different people
- to thereby defend (knowingly or otherwise) a Platonic conception of truth and its verification in knowledge, such that truths are truths are truths and are not "truths for some particular mind"
William Brown
The problem with this agenda is that it's in conflict with itself at about a dozen points internally. Whether modern analytic philosophers admit it or not, the desire for a Platonist conception of truth to justify a rejection of psychologism required a rationalist metaphysics, and the early logicians were Platonists, tacitly or self-consciously, or they were at the very least Kantians (for whom Platonic truth-in-itself is simply transposed to the human mind, as opposed to the mind of God or the world-in-itself). As Wittgenstein says in his later work, "[the] essence [of thinking], logic, presents an order: namely: the a priori order of the world; that is, the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common" (PI §97). (Meaning, the pure or analytic, that is categorial constitution of reality in its "possibilities," i.e., prior to any empirical, a posteriori knowledge about it.) But many of them clearly and often loudly understood themselves as anti-metaphysical thinkers, anti-rationalist, simply concerned with formalizing language. This paradox is still unresolved with regard to Frege, the most central figure of modern logic's formalization, whose metaphysical presuppositions (Platonist rationalist? Kantian? simply "unconcerned" with metaphysics, whatever the fuck that even means?) are still contentious among scholars. Frege kept up a correspondence with Husserl, another "logician" who was actually an arch-Kantian phenomenologist who actually thought that logic as it's currently studied, that is as a set of formal meta-languages, was relatively unimportant compared to pure or transcendental logic, i.e., the a priori categorial order either of the world in itself or of thought in itself.
Likewise, Whitehead became extremely critical of the logical positivists and formulated a highly metaphysical Naturphilosophie on the basis of a pragmatist epistemology. Russell virtually ended up a sceptic with regard to metaphysics and the world, so his logicism became anti-Platonist and merely utilitarian, a "tool" to aid material science, inviting the question "why bother, then?" Wittgenstein completely repudiated logicism for reasons fundamentally similar to Husserl. Hardcore Vienna positivists like Schlick, Carnap, and Hempel are almost only cited in order to mock them these days.
Benjamin Wright
The specific form of "logic" as understood by the modern Philosophy undergrad is weird in that it's really a legacy of this brief and confused period, pre-WW2. And it was only ever strong in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world. By the 1940s, the postpostivist tendencies were already very visible, and the best and most original thinkers began turning to American pragmatism and returning (often covertly or unintentionally) to German idealism and neo-Kantianism. By the '50s and '60s, "ordinary language philosophy" had eclipsed formal logic in epistemological and metaphysical primacy, though logic was still taught as a sort of foundation for philosophical thinking, oddly enough returning it to the same liminal and ambiguous status it had prior to the 1880s, except now (pointlessly?) equipped with decades of Fregean formalisms and symbolic registers. In the following decades, interest in American pragmatism and continental linguistic and hermeneutic philosophy infected English-speaking Philosophy departments even more.
Some weird developments did happen to reinvigorate logic studies, like Saul Kripke's confused quasi-philosophical/anti-philosophical logicism, but essentially from that period onward logic became increasingly a specialist affair. Nobody really believes in the old logicist project anymore (if anyone ever did, outside of Vienna). Yet somehow, the more faith is lost in the actual philosophical value of logic, the more students of logic gain in pride that they spent four years learning how to describe mythical structures like "possible worlds." Within a generation, the only people who still learn actual formal logic will be a handful of British students who still haven't gotten the fucking memo.
In short, nobody outside of logicians gives a fuck about logic. Increasingly, analytics don't even give a fuck. If you want to judge for yourself whether learning some specific variant of specifically modern formal logic is useful, go read something like Kit Fine's recent work on "grounds," which is (apparently) cutting-edge and trendy, and calls on plenty of logic-chopping. That way you can see the potential fruits of teaching yourself that way of thinking, as a taste of what you could read/do at some point. Personally I think it's hilariously bad, has no advantages whatsoever over simply learning to think and speak philosophically, that is carefully, and in fact rather than clarifying language it actually blinds you to the irreducibly interpretative nature of language by implicitly hypostatizing linguistic entities like "speech acts," "modal operators," the "judgment-character" latent in or essential to a thought (as opposed to what?), "logical atoms," etc. In my experience, logicists have the worst of both worlds: they are radical nominalists on the surface of their thinking, but radical and unreflective realists with regard to all the heuristics they employ to "purify" thought.
Gavin Allen
Even when people trained as logicists escape from logic, and begin to think normally again, they often retain unexamined preconceptions. Whenever logicists become post-logical pragmatists, they still think about language in a fundamentally "logical" way. It's like it's painful for them to simply drop the crypto-rationalist, logicist way of seeing things like thought, truth, essence. It makes me realise how revolutionary Ockhamism and humanist anti-scholasticism must have seemed when they emerged, because apparently logicism is a fucking hard set of blinders to remove once they're on.
The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy has a good introductory essay by Dermot Moran on the division of analytic and continental philosophy. He's a Husserl scholar who very deeply understands the genesis of modern analytic philosophy from the same milieu that produced phenomenology and the crisis of mathematical foundations. A weirder recommendation: Read Collingwood's Autobiography and note how he talks about his colleagues, British professors of philosophy, as closed-minded snarky "gotcha!" types who haven't actually read anything deeply. That's Russell's milieu, and that's consequently the generation of logic professors who taught the postwar, post-positivist generation logic even after its real core motivation had already burned out. Here's Gillian Rose on that generation:
>In a late interview, Rose commented of philosophers trained at Oxford, "It teaches them to be clever, destructive, supercilious and ignorant. It doesn’t teach you what’s important. It doesn’t feed the soul."
Not that I'm a huge fan of Rose either but that's an honest assessment of Oxbridge idiots and their insular solipsism.
Frege himself was alright, but (I think anyway) very confused.
Jose Kelly
That's the whole point. It is Freshman's duty to think of logic as a matter of calculation to the fullest possible by firstly excluding semantics. so he should remind that proof by the truth table only has convenience.
Cameron Ramirez
>The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy
>Collingwood's Autobiography
What?? What The Fuck???
you say that level of intellectual shit and ended up with This?
That would be the worst recommendation to one who want to start a Fucking LOGIC
Just give something like Enderton mathematical introduction to logic
What is This fucking place
Owen Sullivan
Read Plato or be doomed to pseudery eternally.
Thomas Taylor
Moran gives a nice thumbnail sketch of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, a question that gets about five or six times a week on Yea Forums every week for the past 8 years but somehow never actually answered. People should know this before committing years to learning something that might end up being a lot of nothing.
I can't recommend a logic textbook to OP because I don't study logic, but also because what form of logic you learn depends on a lot of factors. Which is also a good argument for knowing about the history of the things you're learning before just picking one at random, or taking a random recommendation from some guy at face value. A philosopher of math is not going to give the same recommendation as a philosopher of logic, or a New Wittgensteinian, or a pragmatist analytic who thinks you only need the bare minimum "any textbook will do" logic, just to be able to read basic proofs once in a while, or the hundred different kinds of specialist who all have different opinions on which upper-year advanced logic is the ultimate one to be aiming for.
I dated an analytic philosopher and she always told me to start with Frege, which was terrible advice (I hope you don't read this).
Collingwood is just a good read though.
Blake Edwards
I mean, he gave a good explanation on the downfall of logicism, or how useless logic is to philosophy. But yeah. This is nothing good for someone who's just trying to start logic
Lincoln Anderson
OP doesn't say anything about division between analytic and continental. Moreover, no matter I agree how good this is, you should not consider this as full picture of the reason of division because he took out Heidegger's Being and Time, the biggest cause of it.
>start with Frege, which was terrible advice (I hope you don't read this)
What's wrong about Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik?
Josiah Taylor
Collingwoodfag is an autist and shits up every thread on art with his bullshit.
Guess he's spilling over into other threads.
Take your Collingwood ASS back to redddit
Austin Howard
>Heidegger's Being and Time, the biggest cause of it.
The biggest cause of what? Being and Time came out in 1927 and was pretty much ignored and misunderstood by logical positivists and analytics. I guess there's the famous anecdotes about "the Nothing itself nothings!" and etc., but Lebensphilosophie was already around before Heidegger. He definitely had an epochal significance for people already within that stream of thought, but they weren't going to be positivists either way.
Interestingly, I think Wittgenstein read Being and Time and defended it.
Noah Taylor
OP here, thanks for all of this information user :)
Asher Butler
listen to under pressure to start with logic.
Jaxon Turner
op here, that is not the logic I am referring to! I would advise you to discuss THAT logic over at Yea Forums!!
Dylan Adams
Do not listen to this guys, he is Collingwoodposter
He often appeared in aesthetic thread but when someone from analytic and Husserl appears then he came
He has ability to relate and often bash every philosophy with the recommendation of Collingwood's Autobiography with masterful and deceitful skill of rhetoric
Here is the list
archived.moe
archived.moe
archived.moe
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archived.moe
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Nolan Garcia
I don't know this Collingwoodposter guy. I think you accused me of being him like a year ago too.
I'm definitely this person:
archived.moe
archived.moe
archived.moe
archived.moe
These are pretty obviously all me I think. The others aren't though:
archived.moe
archived.moe
archived.moe
Is the only link between me and the other guy that he also likes Collingwood? I only really like Collingwood's autobio and his stuff on hermeneutics, I don't know his aesthetics really. I've been meaning to read his metaphysics but never get to it.
Logan Garcia
classical logic should be enough for a dilettante
Matthew Evans
Socratic Logic
Kreeft
Carter Butler
You're welcome friend, sorry I got autistically carried away. I always hit that point and think "welp, maybe someone will skim over it and at least get something useful from it."
Nolan Bennett
where to start with collingwood?
Mason Morgan
Collingwoodfag samefagging so hard.
Ayden Butler
Your starting point will depend on how much time you intend to devote to the study of logic.
A lifetime? Start with the Greeks. Bonus points for learning Ancient Greek first.
A few years? Go through one of the autistic lists above.
A year or so? Get a good survey textbook, a few advanced textbooks, and supplement with primary sources as desired.
A few days or weeks? Pic related.
Ryder Lee
thanks