I re-train my logical faculty
As the temperature cools, I wonder if I should cut the grass less often. Its growth this week has been negligible.
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Having not studied any formal logic for about fifteen years, I’m working through some very basic textbooks to undo the rust. The funnest one is Logic by Wilfrid Hodges (2nd edition, Penguin, 2001), but not for any reason to do with logic (were I a logician, I’m sure I’d find things to quibble with; indeed, logicians are so finicky, they often assign their own notes when they teach). I just like Hodges’s wry humor and poetical examples. The book makes heavy use of truth trees, which I don’t remember ever having worked with.
I also have the first edition of Barwise & Etchemendy – the book that Cornell undergraduates used to study – but not the software. Oh, look! The second edition is online! All typeset in glorious, drab Computer Modern! Which, incidentally, looks the same as the current font of this blog.
Also online, also typeset in Computer Modern, is the open-source forallx (“for all x”) by a philosopher I once heard speak at Cornell. He praised the grad student who commented on his talk because the student’s notes were nicely typeset (in Computer Modern). It was a genuine compliment, not a Gricean insult.
After I’m happy with my re-mastery of propositional and predicate logic, I’ll read Quine’s Philosophy of Logic, which I meant to do eighteen or nineteen years ago.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Having not studied any formal logic for about fifteen years, I’m working through some very basic textbooks to undo the rust. The funnest one is Logic by Wilfrid Hodges (2nd edition, Penguin, 2001), but not for any reason to do with logic (were I a logician, I’m sure I’d find things to quibble with; indeed, logicians are so finicky, they often assign their own notes when they teach). I just like Hodges’s wry humor and poetical examples. The book makes heavy use of truth trees, which I don’t remember ever having worked with.
I also have the first edition of Barwise & Etchemendy – the book that Cornell undergraduates used to study – but not the software. Oh, look! The second edition is online! All typeset in glorious, drab Computer Modern! Which, incidentally, looks the same as the current font of this blog.
Also online, also typeset in Computer Modern, is the open-source forallx (“for all x”) by a philosopher I once heard speak at Cornell. He praised the grad student who commented on his talk because the student’s notes were nicely typeset (in Computer Modern). It was a genuine compliment, not a Gricean insult.
After I’m happy with my re-mastery of propositional and predicate logic, I’ll read Quine’s Philosophy of Logic, which I meant to do eighteen or nineteen years ago.