Description
Book SynopsisSelected Logic Papers, long out of print and now reissued with eight additional essays, includes much of the author's important work on mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics from the past sixty years.
Trade Review[Quine] is at once the most elegant expounder of systematic logic in the older, pre-Gödelian style of Frege and Russell, the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank… This is an amazing feat of condensation with something solid to say in its brief scope about every major topic of interest in modern formal logic. * New York Review of Books *
What [Quine] is expert in is, of course, logic… What [this book offers] is a view of the expert at work.
Selected Logic Papers shows him actually doing logic… Logic is not a guide to life, but then Quine has never maintained that it was. It is a powerful adjunct to empirical inquiry, whose proper use requires prior discipline; its virtue lies in the fact that if we supply it with truth, it will never yield falsehood. Few have shown the manner of its use with more authority. * Partisan Review *
This book is of continuing, not just historical interest. Quine is the greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century. His work in logic is inseparable from his work in other parts of philosophy. -- George Boolos, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Table of ContentsWhitehead and the Rise of Modern Logic (1941); Logic, Symbolic (1954); A Method of Generating Part of Arithmetic Without Use of Intuitive Logic (1934); Definition of Substitution (1936); Concatenation as a Basis for Arithmetic (1946); Set-theoretic Foundations for Logic (1936); Logic Based on Inclusion and Abstraction (1937); On Ordered Pairs and Relations (1945-46); On w-Inconsistency and a So-called Axiom of Infinity (1952); Element and Number (1941); On an Application of Tarski's Theory of Truth (1952); On Frege's Way Out (1954); Completeness of the Propositional Calculus (1937); On Cores and Prime Implicants of Truth Functions (1958); Two Theorems about Truth Functions (1951); On Boolean Functions (1949); On the Logic of Quantification (1945); A Proof Procedure for Quantification Theory (1954); Interpretations of Sets of Conditions (1953); Church's Theorem on the Decision Problem (1954); Quantification and the Empty Domain (1953); Reduction to a Dyadic Predicate (1953); Variables Explained Away (1960); Truth, Paradox, and Godel's Theorem (1992); Immanence and Validity (1991); MacHale on Boole (1985); Peirce's Logic (1989); Peano as Logician (1982); Free Logic, Description, and Virtual Classes (1994); The Inception of "New Foundations" (1987); Pythagorean Triples and Fermat's Last Theorem (1992).
