A First Course in Logic, Gold Edition

Great introductory logic course book that makes the concepts of formal logic easy for just about anybody. Carter has a great sense of humor, unfortunately some of that has been edited out by the publishers but it is still a great introductory text book.

I was fortunate enough to not only learn from this clear, concise, excellent text, but to take the course with Dr. Carter himself. Just recently a friend saw it on my bookshelf and exclaimed, "OH, we used this in my deductive logic class at Harvard; it was so much more student-friendly than Copi's." Dr. Carter is a great writer, logician, and teacher. Due to these factors, this book can be used independently, or as part of a class, to learn the art of logic.

I began my long logic study with this book. It does an excellent job of laying the ground work, teaching the student rule by rule and with examples that are easy to understand and sometimes entertaining even (e.g. there are a few linguistic proofs on Lord of the Rings). Carter does an excellent job of writing as a teacher to a student instead of a logician to other logicians. That is not to say that the text is remedial, only readable. As the student becomes more familiar with logic Carter goes into more depth and complexity. This logic book is being used in a lot of universities now and I hope it spreads to all of them.

Having used the previous edition for two years in my Deductive Logic class at Evangel University, I would recommend it wholeheartedly for Formal or Deductive Logic. As a guide to informal or natural language logic, it is useful (I use some of his categories of natural language fallacies,) but it lacks the depth of a dedicated text. This is not a weakness. For the students, this is a great text with plenty of examples and exercises. Not only is the layout useful for learning but also easy for teaching. Having used Irving Copi texts for a number of years, this is a tremendous improvement. I lament the inclusion of Copi's favored notation for conditionals, because it seems less intuitive than the arrow for conditional statements and double arrow for bi-conditional statements Carter used in the previous edition. In logic texts I have seen both types of notation used with equal frequency. But this is probably a marketing issue. In many cases he uses the same examples throughout the book. This is great, because not only does he engage the intuition of the student using familiar material, but shows how analysis can be taken to different depths and how different tools may be applied in various circumstances to the same problems. The book needs to be studied well before used as a text. His formal rules, though perfectly apt for the material are used differently from Copi's. One can't leap easily from Copi to Carter without a bit of familiarization with Carter's method. I found myself wanting to use Copi's rules occasionally. The payoff is in staying with Carter's evenhanded, well-paced treatment of the topic. I found that few students were left behind in a class of 40, even when I blazed forward with new concepts every class. This book is a treat for the educator, and reveals the underlying elegance of the discipline for the student.