Warren Goldfarb's long-awaited Deductive Logic is an unusually perspicuous and effective logic textbook. It succeeds in achieving great precision without seeming pedantic and great depth without compromising accessibility. One main advantage of this book relative to its competitors is the lucidity with which it explains, in ways that even beginners can fully appreciate, the rapport between semantic and syntactic captures of logical consequence. Another marked advantage is the book's emphasis on deduction and its insistence on motivating the various clauses of the rules of deduction by showing, for example, what would ensue had these clauses been flouted. In this, Deductive Logic fills a real lacuna in logic-instruction and avoids the common pedagogical pitfalls of instruction via the tree method, where students find it rather mysterious why and how the method really works. The book is written in a clear and lively style and contains numerous exercises of varying degrees of difficulty. It is ideally suited for students in philosophy and computer science. --Ori Simchen, University of British Columbia
This is the finest introduction to logic available. --John Symons, University of Texas, El Paso
Warren Goldfarb is Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, and Professor of Philosophy, at Harvard University.
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From the Introduction:
"This book is divided into four Parts. In the first, we treat truth-functional logic, which concerns those structures signaled in ordinary language by and , or , not , and if ... then . The second takes up simple quantificational logic, which treats all and some . The third extends quantificational logic to cover cases that results when nested structures of all and some are allowed, as in statements like Everybody loves somebody sometime . Finally, Part IV discusses the logic of identity ( is equal to , is the same as ) and of complex names."
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