Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide (Introducing...) [Kindle-editie]

If you have had any sort of encounter with logic (I've had propositional, predicate, and a touch of modal logic) this book will be a fun overview of the history of logic and important figures in the science. It covers classical, fuzzy, and quantum logic and explores the attempts to found mathematics on logical foundations (Frege, Russell). The ideas of all the greats are introduced with ease (Leibniz, Godel, Hilbert, Aristotle, Quine, Davidson, Turing, Wittgenstein, etc). And it details how computers have their basis in logical systems.
It's presented in cartoonish fashion, but is an intelligent (and not a dumbed down) overview of the subject. Someone who has not had logic will benefit from a couple of readings. As the book is not long this shouldn't be difficult (it might just be all you'd ever need or want to know about the subject).
There is a section of further reading that recommends one of the best 1st order logic book - Tomassi - that I've encountered. The other recommendations are perfect for one who wants to delve deeper into this fascinating field.

_Introducing Logic_ by Dan Cryan et al. is a great book, as long as you know what you're getting. It covers seemingly everything: syllogisms, ancient Greeks, set theory, paradoxes, truth tables, neural nets, nonclassical logics, proof theory, Godel's theorem, Lewis Carroll's nonsense, AI, relativism, cognitive science, linguistics, even varying cultural approaches to thinking, and a lot more.

It's fun and it's quick-moving.

Just don't expect a book with these advantages to have depth. There are no exercises, explanations are never thorough, and sometimes you'll wonder what is the connection between adjacent pages.

And some things had to be left out. Where is the discussion of fallacies, for example? Missing.

Those are not faults; they are characteristics. If you want a meaty textbook, try something else (like Irving Copi's _Introduction to Logic_, for example). But you'll lose the virtues of this book, in doing so, unless you somehow use both books.

This book is useful for showing you "what's out there" in the world of logic. It shows you the landscape, but it doesn't make you acquainted with the residents.

I love it.

While the comic-strip style of the "Introducing..." series can be entertaining and beneficial when it comes to breaking up the monotony of dense philosophy, it also tends to be rather distracting and can make the survey of Logic more difficult to understand. HOWEVER, I think this volume is well done!

I feel very comfortable recommending this volume to anyone who is looking for a survey of the philosophy of Logic. While some find this to rudimentary, I believe that is the entire point. This little book is a great afternoon read that outlines the philosophy of Logic in a very approachable manner.

Pick this book up!

It may seem petty to complain about the omission of one logician in a book that covers such a vast scope in such little space, but really the absence of a key figure like George Boole is very strange. However, the book remains a great summary and overview. It introduces many important ideas and thinkers, is fun and readable and will help you decide if you want to pursue the subject further. If you do, the reading list at the end will steer you in the right direction. If you are completely new to the subject, I would not actually recommend this as your very first book. Ironically enough, you would be better starting with an elementary text on Boolean algebra, to show you some formal logic in action. Then you would get more out of this present work, the great strength of which is that it provides a historical and conceptual framework for further study.

I was given this book as a Christmas present by a good friend of mine, and I had at it slowly, reading a few pages here and there before bed. When I started it, I expected it to be a pretty light presentation of the history of basic logic and logicians, but before the long the book gets surprisingly detailed and far-reaching.

Its summary goes from the ancient Greeks up to the present, lingering for a long time on key figures like Russell and Hilbert, but it doesn't take a linear path to get there. The book explains the quest to come up with a consistent framework of logic that is capable of describing the world, and also the work done by others that undermine this goal (though that undermining is itself an important contribution to the field). There are excursions into the life and work of both Alan Turing and Noam Chomsky, a linguist and a computer scientist, who aren't always thought of as logicians in the traditional sense, but whose work has nevertheless contributed greatly to the field. Then there are others like Godel, who shook the foundations of logic to its core with his incompleteness theorems (which basically state that within any non-trivial system of logic, there must be some statements that are true but not provable). The concepts can get pretty intense sometimes, but they're presented logically and clearly.

If you're looking for a logic book that covers quite a lot of ground while still being accessible, then I can't recommend this one highly enough. It has certainly made me curious to read in further detail about logic's history and progression.