Thinking About Logic: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic

I checked this book out of the library to do a basic review of intuitionistic vs. classical logic. It was so readable and so useful, I had to buy a copy of my own. Undergrad students often balk at some of the assumptions they meet in introductory logic classes. What, for instance, is the rationale behind the truth values for material implication? Why is every proposition either true or false? Why can we reason from a double-negation to the affirmative? If you are familiar with classical logic already, this book is an extremely accessible introduction to long-standing debates among professional logicians.

Stephen Read is a great philosopher and logician, and he shows in this book that logic is philosophically alive. There's lots of insight in this book, and it's an ideal companion for anyone who is learning logic at a university level and who has a niggling feeling that not everything is as clear-cut as it's sometimes taught.The book is wide ranging, with excellent chapters on conditionality, truth, vagueness, names and non-referring terms. My upper level logic students love it, and my intro students use it to see where logic can take them and why it's such an interesting field. Read it!

This book is one of the best I have read on the philosophy of logic. The best chapters are 1, 2, and 3 on truth, logical consequence, and conditionals. The author espouses moderate realism, a commonsense approach. He reviews the existing scholarship on topics before proffering his own well-reasoned opinions. Most modern basic logic texts go off a cliff in accepting bizarre definitions of validity and truth conditons for conditional propositions. Most explain that conditional propositions can be treated as truth functional material conditionals. Read corrects these errors.