Topics Logic

Question Can you possibly suggest any good philosophical resources for the study of logic? Concerning validity, soundness, paraphrasing and diagramming. I am studying philosophy at Uni and am struggling alot with just the introduction of the module and need some extra help as even the text books offered seem a little complex for me.

Accepted:
February 11, 2010

Comments

Any university library will have dozens of elementary textbooks in its collection with titles like "Logic", "Formal Logic", "Elementary Logic", "Beginning Logic", "The Logic Book", etc. etc. The best advice is probably just to quickly browse through the opening chapter or two of a whole pile of them, till you find one that works for you.

But here are three specific suggestions. I often recommend Samuel Guttenplan's The Languages of Logic for beginners who are struggling. Another quite excellent resource -- and freely downloadable -- is Paul Teller's A Modern Formal Logic Primer, available at http://tellerprimer.ucdavis.edu/

And then I have to confess I do still rather like P*t*r Sm*th's An Introduction to Formal Logic (though use the heavily corrected 2009 reprint).