Logic in Greece
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The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (
logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premise ...
). Formal logics developed in ancient times in
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
, China, and
Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...
. Greek methods, particularly Aristotelian logic (or term logic) as found in the ''
Organon The ''Organon'' ( grc, Ὄργανον, meaning "instrument, tool, organ") is the standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name ''Organon'' was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics. The six ...
'', found wide application and acceptance in Western science and mathematics for millennia.Boehner p. xiv The Stoics, especially Chrysippus, began the development of
predicate logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
. Christian and Islamic philosophers such as
Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius (; Latin: ''Boetius''; 480 – 524 AD), was a Roman senator, consul, ''magister officiorum'', historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the tr ...
(died 524), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, died 1037) and
William of Ockham William of Ockham, OFM (; also Occam, from la, Gulielmus Occamus; 1287 – 10 April 1347) was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small vil ...
(died 1347) further developed Plato's logic in the
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
, reaching a high point in the mid-fourteenth century, with
Jean Buridan Jean Buridan (; Latin: ''Johannes Buridanus''; – ) was an influential 14th-century French philosopher. Buridan was a teacher in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career who focused in particular on logic and the wor ...
. The period between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw largely decline and neglect, and at least one historian of logic regards this time as barren.Oxford Companion p. 498; Bochenski, Part I Introduction, ''passim''
Empirical methods Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. It is also a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Empiricism values some research more than other kinds. Empirical evidence (the record of o ...
ruled the day, as evidenced by Sir
Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
's ''
Novum Organon The ''Novum Organum'', fully ''Novum Organum, sive Indicia Vera de Interpretatione Naturae'' ("New organon, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature") or ''Instaurationis Magnae, Pars II'' ("Part II of The Great Instauration ...
'' of 1620. Logic revived in the mid-nineteenth century, at the beginning of a revolutionary period when the subject developed into a rigorous and formal discipline which took as its exemplar the exact method of proof used in mathematics, a hearkening back to the Greek tradition. The development of the modern "symbolic" or "mathematical" logic during this period by the likes of Boole,
Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
, Russell, and
Peano Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The sta ...
is the most significant in the two-thousand-year history of logic, and is arguably one of the most important and remarkable events in human intellectual history.Oxford Companion p. 500 Progress in
mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...
in the first few decades of the twentieth century, particularly arising from the work of Gödel and Tarski, had a significant impact on analytic philosophy and philosophical logic, particularly from the 1950s onwards, in subjects such as modal logic,
temporal logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...
,
deontic logic Deontic logic is the field of philosophical logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. It ...
, and
relevance logic Relevance logic, also called relevant logic, is a kind of non-classical logic requiring the antecedent and consequent of implications to be relevantly related. They may be viewed as a family of substructural or modal logics. It is generally, but ...
.


Logic in the East


Logic in India


Hindu logic


Origin

The
Nasadiya Sukta The Nāsadīya Sūkta (after the incipit ', or "not the non-existent"), also known as the Hymn of Creation, is the 129th hymn of the 10th mandala of the Rigveda (10:129). It is concerned with cosmology and the origin of the universe. Nasadiya Su ...
of the ''
Rigveda The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts ('' śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one ...
'' ( RV 10.129) contains
ontological In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
speculation in terms of various logical divisions that were later recast formally as the four circles of '' catuskoti'': "A", "not A", "A and 'not A'", and "not A and not not A". Logic began independently in
ancient India According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Quote: "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by m ...
and continued to develop to early modern times without any known influence from Greek logic.


Before Gautama

Though the origins in India of public debate (''pariṣad''), one form of rational inquiry, are not clear, we know that public debates were common in preclassical India, for they are frequently alluded to in various '' Upaniṣads'' and in the early Buddhist literature. Public debate is not the only form of public deliberations in preclassical India. Assemblies (''pariṣad'' or '' sabhā'') of various sorts, comprising relevant experts, were regularly convened to deliberate on a variety of matters, including administrative, legal and religious matters.


Dattatreya

A philosopher named Dattatreya is stated in the
Bhagavata purana The ''Bhagavata Purana'' ( sa, भागवतपुराण; ), also known as the ''Srimad Bhagavatam'', ''Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana'' or simply ''Bhagavata'', is one of Hinduism's eighteen great Puranas (''Mahapuranas''). Composed in S ...
to have taught Anvlksikl to Aiarka, Prahlada and others. It appears from the
Markandeya purana The ''Markandeya Purana'' ( sa, मार्कण्डेय पुराण; IAST: ) is a Sanskrit text of Hinduism, and one of the eighteen major Puranas. The text's title Markandeya refers to a sage in Hindu History, who is the central c ...
that the Anvlksikl-vidya expounded by him consisted of a mere disquisition on soul in accordance with the yoga philosophy. Dattatreya expounded the philosophical side of Anvlksiki and not its logical aspect.


Medhatithi Gautama

While the teachers mentioned before dealt with some particular topics of Anviksiki, the credit of founding the Anviksiki in its special sense of a science is to be attributed to Medhatithi Gautama (c. 6th century BC). Guatama founded the ''
anviksiki Ānvīkṣikī is a term in Sanskrit denoting roughly the "science of inquiry" and it should have been recognized in India as a distinct branch of learning as early as 650 BCE. However, over the centuries its meaning and import have undergone con ...
'' school of logic. The ''
Mahabharata The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Ramayana, Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the s ...
'' (12.173.45), around the 5th century BC, refers to the ''anviksiki'' and ''tarka'' schools of logic.


Panini

(c. 5th century BC) developed a form of logic (to which Boolean logic has some similarities) for his formulation of
Sanskrit grammar The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), culminati ...
. Logic is described by
Chanakya Chanakya (Sanskrit: चाणक्य; IAST: ', ; 375–283 BCE) was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭil ...
(c. 350-283 BC) in his '' Arthashastra'' as an independent field of inquiry.


Nyaya-Vaisheshika

Two of the six Indian schools of thought deal with logic: Nyaya and
Vaisheshika Vaisheshika or Vaiśeṣika ( sa, वैशेषिक) is one of the six schools of Indian philosophy (Vedic systems) from ancient India. In its early stages, the Vaiśeṣika was an independent philosophy with its own metaphysics, epistemolog ...
. The
Nyāya Sūtras The ''Nyāya Sūtras'' is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text composed by , and the foundational text of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy. The date when the text was composed, and the biography of its author is unknown, but variously esti ...
of Aksapada Gautama (c. 2nd century AD) constitute the core texts of the Nyaya school, one of the six orthodox schools of
Hindu Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...
philosophy. This realist school developed a rigid five-member schema of inference involving an initial premise, a reason, an example, an application, and a conclusion. The
idealist In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to id ...
Buddhist philosophy Buddhist philosophy refers to the philosophical investigations and systems of inquiry that developed among various schools of Buddhism in India following the parinirvana of The Buddha and later spread throughout Asia. The Buddhist path combin ...
became the chief opponent to the Naiyayikas.


Jain Logic

Jains Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle being ...
made its own unique contribution to this mainstream development of logic by also occupying itself with the basic epistemological issues, namely, with those concerning the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is derived, and in what way knowledge can be said to be reliable. The Jains have doctrines of relativity used for logic and reasoning: *
Anekāntavāda ( hi, अनेकान्तवाद, "many-sidedness") is the Jain doctrine about metaphysical truths that emerged in ancient India. It states that the ultimate truth and reality is complex and has multiple aspects. According to Jainism ...
– the theory of relative pluralism or manifoldness; *
Syādvāda ( hi, अनेकान्तवाद, "many-sidedness") is the Jain doctrine about metaphysical truths that emerged in ancient India. It states that the ultimate truth and reality is complex and has multiple aspects. According to Jainism ...
– the theory of conditioned predication and; * Nayavāda – The theory of partial standpoints. These Jain philosophical concepts made most important contributions to the ancient
Indian philosophy Indian philosophy refers to philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. A traditional Hindu classification divides āstika and nāstika schools of philosophy, depending on one of three alternate criteria: whether it believes the Veda ...
, especially in the areas of skepticism and relativity


Buddhist logic


Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna Nāgārjuna . 150 – c. 250 CE (disputed)was an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker, scholar-saint and philosopher. He is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers.Garfield, Jay L. (1995), ''The Fundamental Wisdom of ...
(c. 150-250 AD), the founder of the
Madhyamaka Mādhyamaka ("middle way" or "centrism"; ; Tibetan: དབུ་མ་པ ; ''dbu ma pa''), otherwise known as Śūnyavāda ("the emptiness doctrine") and Niḥsvabhāvavāda ("the no ''svabhāva'' doctrine"), refers to a tradition of Buddhi ...
("Middle Way") developed an analysis known as the
catuṣkoṭi ''Catuṣkoṭi'' (Sanskrit; Devanagari: चतुष्कोटि, , Sinhalese:චතුස්කෝටිකය) is a logical argument(s) of a 'suite of four discrete functions' or 'an indivisible quaternity' that has multiple applications an ...
(Sanskrit), a "four-cornered" system of argumentation that involves the systematic examination and rejection of each of the 4 possibilities of a proposition, ''P'': # ''P''; that is, being. # not ''P''; that is, not being. # ''P'' and not ''P''; that is, being and not being. # not (''P'' or not ''P''); that is, neither being nor not being.Under
propositional logic Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations b ...
,
De Morgan's laws In propositional logic and Boolean algebra, De Morgan's laws, also known as De Morgan's theorem, are a pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference. They are named after Augustus De Morgan, a 19th-century British math ...
imply that this is equivalent to the third case (''P'' and not ''P''), and is therefore superfluous; there are actually only 3 cases to consider.


Dignaga

However,
Dignāga Dignāga (a.k.a. ''Diṅnāga'', c. 480 – c. 540 CE) was an Indian Buddhist scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic (''hetu vidyā''). Dignāga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and ...
(c 480-540 AD) is sometimes said to have developed a formal syllogism, and it was through him and his successor,
Dharmakirti Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 6th or 7th century; Tibetan: ཆོས་ཀྱི་གྲགས་པ་; Wylie: ''chos kyi grags pa''), was an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at Nālandā.Tom Tillemans (2011)Dharmakirti Stanford ...
, that
Buddhist logic Buddhist logico-epistemology is a term used in Western scholarship for ''pramāṇa-vāda'' (doctrine of proof) and ''Hetu-vidya'' (science of causes). Pramāṇa-vāda is an epistemological study of the nature of knowledge; Hetu-vidya is a syste ...
reached its height; it is contested whether their analysis actually constitutes a formal syllogistic system. In particular, their analysis centered on the definition of an inference-warranting relation, "
vyapti a Sanskrit expression, in Hindu philosophy refers to the state of pervasion. It is considered as the logical ground of inference which is one of the means to knowledge. No conclusion can be inferred without the knowledge of vyapti. Vyapti guarant ...
", also known as invariable concomitance or pervasion. To this end, a doctrine known as "apoha" or differentiation was developed. This involved what might be called inclusion and exclusion of defining properties. Dignāga's famous "wheel of reason" ('' Hetucakra'') is a method of indicating when one thing (such as smoke) can be taken as an invariable sign of another thing (like fire), but the inference is often inductive and based on past observation. Matilal remarks that Dignāga's analysis is much like John Stuart Mill's Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, which is inductive.


Syllogism and influence

In addition, the traditional five-member Indian syllogism, though deductively valid, has repetitions that are unnecessary to its logical validity. As a result, some commentators see the traditional Indian syllogism as a rhetorical form that is entirely natural in many cultures of the world, and yet not as a logical form—not in the sense that all logically unnecessary elements have been omitted for the sake of analysis.


Logic in China

In China, a contemporary of
Confucius Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...
, Mozi, "Master Mo", is credited with founding the Mohist school, whose canons dealt with issues relating to valid inference and the conditions of correct conclusions. In particular, one of the schools that grew out of Mohism, the
Logicians Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
, are credited by some scholars for their early investigation of
formal logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
. Due to the harsh rule of Legalism in the subsequent
Qin Dynasty The Qin dynasty ( ; zh, c=秦朝, p=Qín cháo, w=), or Ch'in dynasty in Wade–Giles romanization ( zh, c=, p=, w=Ch'in ch'ao), was the first dynasty of Imperial China. Named for its heartland in Qin state (modern Gansu and Shaanxi), ...
, this line of investigation disappeared in China until the introduction of Indian philosophy by Buddhists.


Logic in the West


Prehistory of logic

Valid reasoning has been employed in all periods of human history. However, logic studies the ''principles'' of valid reasoning, inference and demonstration. It is probable that the idea of demonstrating a conclusion first arose in connection with
geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is ...
, which originally meant the same as "land measurement". The ancient Egyptians discovered
geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is ...
, including the formula for the volume of a truncated pyramid.Kneale p. 3
Ancient Babylon ''Bābili(m)'' * sux, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 * arc, 𐡁𐡁𐡋 ''Bāḇel'' * syc, ܒܒܠ ''Bāḇel'' * grc-gre, Βαβυλών ''Babylṓn'' * he, בָּבֶל ''Bāvel'' * peo, 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽𐎢 ''Bābiru'' * elx, 𒀸𒁀𒉿𒇷 ''Babi ...
was also skilled in mathematics.
Esagil-kin-apli Esagil-kin-apli was the ''ummânū'', or chief scholar, of Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina, 1067–1046 BCE, as he appears on the Uruk ''List of Sages and Scholars'' (165 BCE)W 20030,7 the Seleucid ''List of Sages and Scholars'', obverse line 16, r ...
's medical ''Diagnostic Handbook'' in the 11th century BC was based on a logical set of axioms and assumptions,H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, Marten Stol, Cornelis Tilburg (2004), ''Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine'', p. 99, Brill Publishers, . while Babylonian astronomers in the 8th and 7th centuries BC employed an
internal logic In classical logic, classical deductive logic, a consistent theory (mathematical logic), theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic de ...
within their predictive planetary systems, an important contribution to the
philosophy of science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ult ...
.D. Brown (2000), ''Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology '', Styx Publications, .


Ancient Greece before Aristotle

While the ancient Egyptians empirically discovered some truths of geometry, the great achievement of the ancient Greeks was to replace empirical methods by demonstrative proof. Both
Thales Thales of Miletus ( ; grc-gre, Θαλῆς; ) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded ...
and
Pythagoras Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His politi ...
of the
Pre-Socratic philosophers Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as early Greek philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of the ...
seemed aware of geometric methods. Fragments of early proofs are preserved in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the idea of a deductive system was probably known in the Pythagorean school and the
Platonic Academy The Academy (Ancient Greek: Ἀκαδημία) was founded by Plato in c. 387 BC in Athens. Aristotle studied there for twenty years (367–347 BC) before founding his own school, the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic p ...
. The proofs of
Euclid of Alexandria Euclid (; grc-gre, Εὐκλείδης; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of g ...
are a paradigm of Greek geometry. The three basic principles of geometry are as follows: * Certain propositions must be accepted as true without demonstration; such a proposition is known as an axiom of geometry. * Every proposition that is not an axiom of geometry must be demonstrated as following from the axioms of geometry; such a demonstration is known as a proof or a "derivation" of the proposition. * The proof must be ''formal''; that is, the derivation of the proposition must be independent of the particular subject matter in question. Further evidence that early Greek thinkers were concerned with the principles of reasoning is found in the fragment called '' dissoi logoi'', probably written at the beginning of the fourth century BC. This is part of a protracted debate about truth and falsity. In the case of the classical Greek city-states, interest in argumentation was also stimulated by the activities of the Rhetoricians or Orators and the Sophists, who used arguments to defend or attack a thesis, both in legal and political contexts.


Thales

It is said Thales, most widely regarded as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, measured the height of the
pyramids A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...
by their shadows at the moment when his own shadow was equal to his height. Thales was said to have had a sacrifice in celebration of discovering
Thales' theorem In geometry, Thales's theorem states that if A, B, and C are distinct points on a circle where the line is a diameter, the angle ABC is a right angle. Thales's theorem is a special case of the inscribed angle theorem and is mentioned and proved ...
just as Pythagoras had the Pythagorean theorem. Thales is the first known individual to use deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to his theorem, and the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.
Indian Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asia ...
and Babylonian mathematicians knew his theorem for special cases before he proved it. It is believed that Thales learned that an angle inscribed in a
semicircle In mathematics (and more specifically geometry), a semicircle is a one-dimensional locus of points that forms half of a circle. The full arc of a semicircle always measures 180° (equivalently, radians, or a half-turn). It has only one line o ...
is a right angle during his travels to Babylon.


Pythagoras

Before 520 BC, on one of his visits to Egypt or Greece, Pythagoras might have met the c. 54 years older Thales. The systematic study of proof seems to have begun with the school of Pythagoras (i. e. the Pythagoreans) in the late sixth century BC. Indeed, the Pythagoreans, believing all was number, are the first philosophers to emphasize ''form'' rather than ''matter''.


Heraclitus and Parmenides

The writing of
Heraclitus Heraclitus of Ephesus (; grc-gre, Ἡράκλειτος , "Glory of Hera"; ) was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire. Little is known of Heraclitus's life. He wrot ...
(c. 535 – c. 475 BC) was the first place where the word ''
logos ''Logos'' (, ; grc, λόγος, lógos, lit=word, discourse, or reason) is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric and refers to the appeal to reason that relies on logic or reason, inductive and deductive reasoning. Ari ...
'' was given special attention in ancient Greek philosophy, Heraclitus held that everything changes and all was fire and conflicting opposites, seemingly unified only by this ''Logos''. He is known for his obscure sayings. In contrast to Heraclitus, Parmenides held that all is one and nothing changes. He may have been a dissident Pythagorean, disagreeing that One (a number) produced the many. "X is not" must always be false or meaningless. What exists can in no way not exist. Our sense perceptions with its noticing of generation and destruction are in grievous error. Instead of sense perception, Parmenides advocated ''logos'' as the means to Truth. He has been called the discoverer of logic,
Zeno of Elea Zeno of Elea (; grc, Ζήνων ὁ Ἐλεᾱ́της; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna Graecia and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known ...
, a pupil of Parmenides, had the idea of a standard argument pattern found in the method of proof known as ''
reductio ad absurdum In logic, (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or ''apagogical arguments'', is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absu ...
''. This is the technique of drawing an obviously false (that is, "absurd") conclusion from an assumption, thus demonstrating that the assumption is false. Therefore, Zeno and his teacher are seen as the first to apply the art of logic. Plato's dialogue Parmenides portrays Zeno as claiming to have written a book defending the
monism Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished: * Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., i ...
of Parmenides by demonstrating the absurd consequence of assuming that there is plurality. Zeno famously used this method to develop his
paradoxes A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
in his arguments against motion. Such ''dialectic'' reasoning later became popular. The members of this school were called "dialecticians" (from a Greek word meaning "to discuss").


Plato

None of the surviving works of the great fourth-century philosopher
Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
(428–347 BC) include any formal logic, but they include important contributions to the field of philosophical logic. Plato raises three questions: * What is it that can properly be called true or false? * What is the nature of the connection between the assumptions of a valid argument and its conclusion? * What is the nature of definition? The first question arises in the dialogue '' Theaetetus'', where Plato identifies thought or opinion with talk or discourse (''logos''). The second question is a result of Plato's
theory of Forms The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is a philosophical theory, fuzzy concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in th ...
. Forms are not things in the ordinary sense, nor strictly ideas in the mind, but they correspond to what philosophers later called
universals In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For exa ...
, namely an abstract entity common to each set of things that have the same name. In both the '' Republic'' and the ''
Sophist A sophist ( el, σοφιστής, sophistes) was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics, and mathematics. They taught ' ...
'', Plato suggests that the necessary connection between the assumptions of a valid argument and its conclusion corresponds to a necessary connection between "forms". The third question is about definition. Many of Plato's dialogues concern the search for a definition of some important concept (justice, truth, the Good), and it is likely that Plato was impressed by the importance of definition in mathematics. What underlies every definition is a Platonic Form, the common nature present in different particular things. Thus, a definition reflects the ultimate object of understanding, and is the foundation of all valid inference. This had a great influence on Plato's student
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
, in particular Aristotle's notion of the
essence Essence ( la, essentia) is a polysemic term, used in philosophy and theology as a designation for the property or set of properties that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it ...
of a thing.


Aristotle

The logic of
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
, and particularly his theory of the syllogism, has had an enormous influence in
Western thought Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ...
. Aristotle was the first logician to attempt a systematic analysis of logical syntax, of noun (or ''
term Term may refer to: * Terminology, or term, a noun or compound word used in a specific context, in particular: **Technical term, part of the specialized vocabulary of a particular field, specifically: ***Scientific terminology, terms used by scient ...
''), and of verb. He was the first ''formal logician'', in that he demonstrated the principles of reasoning by employing variables to show the underlying
logical form In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguou ...
of an argument. He sought relations of dependence which characterize necessary inference, and distinguished the validity of these relations, from the truth of the premises. He was the first to deal with the principles of
contradiction In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's ...
and
excluded middle In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) states that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. It is one of the so-called three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontradi ...
in a systematic way.Bochenski p. 63


The Organon

His logical works, called the ''
Organon The ''Organon'' ( grc, Ὄργανον, meaning "instrument, tool, organ") is the standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name ''Organon'' was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics. The six ...
'', are the earliest formal study of logic that have come down to modern times. Though it is difficult to determine the dates, the probable order of writing of Aristotle's logical works is: * '' The Categories'', a study of the ten kinds of primitive term. * '' The Topics'' (with an appendix called ''
On Sophistical Refutations ''Sophistical Refutations'' ( el, Σοφιστικοὶ Ἔλεγχοι, Sophistikoi Elenchoi; la, De Sophisticis Elenchis) is a text in Aristotle's ''Organon'' in which he identified thirteen fallacies.Sometimes listed as twelve. According to A ...
''), a discussion of dialectics. * ''
On Interpretation ''De Interpretatione'' or ''On Interpretation'' ( Greek: Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, ''Peri Hermeneias'') is the second text from Aristotle's '' Organon'' and is among the earliest surviving philosophical works in the Western tradition to dea ...
'', an analysis of simple categorical propositions into simple terms, negation, and signs of quantity. * '' The Prior Analytics'', a formal analysis of what makes a syllogism (a valid argument, according to Aristotle). * '' The Posterior Analytics'', a study of scientific demonstration, containing Aristotle's mature views on logic. These works are of outstanding importance in the history of logic. In the ''Categories'', he attempts to discern all the possible things to which a term can refer; this idea underpins his philosophical work ''
Metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
'', which itself had a profound influence on Western thought. He also developed a theory of non-formal logic (''i.e.,'' the theory of
fallacies A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or "wrong moves," in the construction of an argument which may appear stronger than it really is if the fallacy is not spotted. The term in the Western intellectual tradition was intr ...
), which is presented in ''Topics'' and ''Sophistical Refutations''. ''On Interpretation'' contains a comprehensive treatment of the notions of
opposition Opposition may refer to: Arts and media * ''Opposition'' (Altars EP), 2011 EP by Christian metalcore band Altars * The Opposition (band), a London post-punk band * '' The Opposition with Jordan Klepper'', a late-night television series on Com ...
and conversion; chapter 7 is at the origin of the square of opposition (or logical square); chapter 9 contains the beginning of modal logic. The ''Prior Analytics'' contains his exposition of the "syllogism", where three important principles are applied for the first time in history: the use of variables, a purely formal treatment, and the use of an axiomatic system.


Stoics

The other great school of Greek logic is that of the Stoics. Stoic logic traces its roots back to the late 5th century BC philosopher
Euclid of Megara Euclid of Megara (; grc-gre, Εὐκλείδης ; c. 435 – c. 365 BC) was a Greek Socratic philosopher who founded the Megarian school of philosophy. He was a pupil of Socrates in the late 5th century BC, and was present at his death. He ...
, a pupil of
Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
and slightly older contemporary of Plato, probably following in the tradition of Parmenides and Zeno. His pupils and successors were called " Megarians", or "Eristics", and later the "Dialecticians". The two most important dialecticians of the Megarian school were
Diodorus Cronus Diodorus Cronus ( el, Διόδωρος Κρόνος; died c. 284 BC) was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected to the Megarian school. He was most notable for logic innovations, including his master argument formulated in response to A ...
and
Philo Philo of Alexandria (; grc, Φίλων, Phílōn; he, יְדִידְיָה, Yəḏīḏyāh (Jedediah); ), also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt. Philo's de ...
, who were active in the late 4th century BC. The Stoics adopted the Megarian logic and systemized it. The most important member of the school was Chrysippus (c. 278–c. 206 BC), who was its third head, and who formalized much of Stoic doctrine. He is supposed to have written over 700 works, including at least 300 on logic, almost none of which survive. Unlike with Aristotle, we have no complete works by the Megarians or the early Stoics, and have to rely mostly on accounts (sometimes hostile) by later sources, including prominently Diogenes Laërtius,
Sextus Empiricus Sextus Empiricus ( grc-gre, Σέξτος Ἐμπειρικός, ; ) was a Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher and Empiric school physician. His philosophical works are the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman Pyrrhonism, and bec ...
,
Galen Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus ( el, Κλαύδιος Γαληνός; September 129 – c. AD 216), often Anglicized as Galen () or Galen of Pergamon, was a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Considered to be one ...
, Aulus Gellius,
Alexander of Aphrodisias Alexander of Aphrodisias ( grc-gre, Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Ἀφροδισιεύς, translit=Alexandros ho Aphrodisieus; AD) was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle ...
, and
Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...
. Three significant contributions of the Stoic school were (i) their account of
modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modaliti ...
, (ii) their theory of the
Material conditional The material conditional (also known as material implication) is an operation commonly used in logic. When the conditional symbol \rightarrow is interpreted as material implication, a formula P \rightarrow Q is true unless P is true and Q i ...
, and (iii) their account of meaning and
truth Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
. * ''Modality''. According to Aristotle, the Megarians of his day claimed there was no distinction between
potentiality and actuality In philosophy, potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his ''Physics'', ''Metaphysics'', ''Nicomachean Ethics'', and '' De Anima''. The ...
. Diodorus Cronus defined the possible as that which either is or will be, the impossible as what will not be true, and the contingent as that which either is already, or will be false. Diodorus is also famous for what is known as his
Master argument :''See Diodorus Cronus § Master argument for the classical master argument related to the problem of future contingents.'' The master argument is George Berkeley's argument that mind-independent objects do not exist because it is impossible to ...
, which states that each pair of the following 3 propositions contradicts the third proposition: :* Everything that is past is true and necessary. :* The impossible does not follow from the possible. :* What neither is nor will be is possible. : Diodorus used the plausibility of the first two to prove that nothing is possible if it neither is nor will be true. Chrysippus, by contrast, denied the second premise and said that the impossible could follow from the possible. * ''Conditional statements''. The first logicians to debate conditional statements were Diodorus and his pupil Philo of Megara. Sextus Empiricus refers three times to a debate between Diodorus and Philo. Philo regarded a conditional as true unless it has both a true antecedent and a false
consequent A consequent is the second half of a hypothetical proposition. In the standard form of such a proposition, it is the part that follows "then". In an implication, if ''P'' implies ''Q'', then ''P'' is called the antecedent and ''Q'' is called ...
. Precisely, let ''T0'' and ''T1'' be true statements, and let ''F0'' and ''F1'' be false statements; then, according to Philo, each of the following conditionals is a true statement, because it is not the case that the consequent is false while the antecedent is true (it is not the case that a false statement is asserted to follow from a true statement): :* If ''T0'', then ''T1'' :* If ''F0'', then ''T0'' :* If ''F0'', then ''F1'' : The following conditional does not meet this requirement, and is therefore a false statement according to Philo: :* If ''T0, then ''F0'' : Indeed, Sextus says "According to [Philo], there are three ways in which a conditional may be true, and one in which it may be false."Sextus Empiricus, ''Adv. Math.'' viii, Section 113 Philo's criterion of truth is what would now be called a
truth-functional In logic, a truth function is a function that accepts truth values as input and produces a unique truth value as output. In other words: The input and output of a truth function are all truth values; a truth function will always output exactly one ...
definition of "if ... then"; it is the definition used in modern logic. :In contrast, Diodorus allowed the validity of conditionals only when the antecedent clause could never lead to an untrue conclusion. A century later, the
Stoic Stoic may refer to: * An adherent of Stoicism; one whose moral quality is associated with that school of philosophy * STOIC, a programming language * ''Stoic'' (film), a 2009 film by Uwe Boll * ''Stoic'' (mixtape), a 2012 mixtape by rapper T-Pain * ...
philosopher Chrysippus attacked the assumptions of both Philo and Diodorus. * ''Meaning and truth''. The most important and striking difference between Megarian-Stoic logic and Aristotelian logic is that Megarian-Stoic logic concerns propositions, not terms, and is thus closer to modern
propositional logic Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations b ...
. The Stoics distinguished between utterance (''phone''), which may be noise, speech (''lexis''), which is articulate but which may be meaningless, and discourse (''logos''), which is meaningful utterance. The most original part of their theory is the idea that what is expressed by a sentence, called a ''lekton'', is something real; this corresponds to what is now called a ''proposition''. Sextus says that according to the Stoics, three things are linked together: that which signifies, that which is signified, and the object; for example, that which signifies is the word ''Dion'', and that which is signified is what Greeks understand but barbarians do not, and the object is Dion himself.


Medieval logic


Logic in the Middle East

The works of
Al-Kindi Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (; ar, أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي; la, Alkindus; c. 801–873 AD) was an Arab Muslim philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician ...
,
Al-Farabi Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi ( fa, ابونصر محمد فارابی), ( ar, أبو نصر محمد الفارابي), known in the West as Alpharabius; (c. 872 – between 14 December, 950 and 12 January, 951)PDF version was a renowned early Isl ...
, Avicenna,
Al-Ghazali Al-Ghazali ( – 19 December 1111; ), full name (), and known in Persian-speaking countries as Imam Muhammad-i Ghazali (Persian: امام محمد غزالی) or in Medieval Europe by the Latinized as Algazelus or Algazel, was a Persian poly ...
,
Averroes Ibn Rushd ( ar, ; full name in ; 14 April 112611 December 1198), often Latinized as Averroes ( ), was an Andalusian polymath and jurist who wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psy ...
and other Muslim logicians were based on Aristotelian logic and were important in communicating the ideas of the ancient world to the medieval West.
Al-Farabi Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi ( fa, ابونصر محمد فارابی), ( ar, أبو نصر محمد الفارابي), known in the West as Alpharabius; (c. 872 – between 14 December, 950 and 12 January, 951)PDF version was a renowned early Isl ...
(Alfarabi) (873–950) was an Aristotelian logician who discussed the topics of future contingents, the number and relation of the categories, the relation between
logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premise ...
and
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domain ...
, and non-Aristotelian forms of inference. Al-Farabi also considered the theories of conditional syllogisms and analogical inference, which were part of the
Stoic Stoic may refer to: * An adherent of Stoicism; one whose moral quality is associated with that school of philosophy * STOIC, a programming language * ''Stoic'' (film), a 2009 film by Uwe Boll * ''Stoic'' (mixtape), a 2012 mixtape by rapper T-Pain * ...
tradition of logic rather than the Aristotelian.
Maimonides Musa ibn Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (); la, Moses Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym Rambam ( he, רמב״ם), was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Tora ...
(1138-1204) wrote a ''Treatise on Logic'' (Arabic: ''Maqala Fi-Sinat Al-Mantiq''), referring to Al-Farabi as the "second master", the first being Aristotle. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037) was the founder of Avicennian logic, which replaced Aristotelian logic as the dominant system of logic in the Islamic world, and also had an important influence on Western medieval writers such as
Albertus Magnus Albertus Magnus (c. 1200 – 15 November 1280), also known as Saint Albert the Great or Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist, and bishop. Later canonised as a Catholic saint, he was known during his li ...
. Avicenna wrote on the
hypothetical syllogism In classical logic, a hypothetical syllogism is a valid argument form, a syllogism with a conditional statement for one or both of its premises. An example in English: :If I do not wake up, then I cannot go to work. :If I cannot go to work, then ...
and on the
propositional calculus Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations ...
, which were both part of the Stoic logical tradition. He developed an original "temporally modalized" syllogistic theory, involving
temporal logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...
and modal logic.History of logic: Arabic logic
''
Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...
''.
He also made use of
inductive logic Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a body of observations. It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations. Inductive reasoning is distinct from ''deductive'' rea ...
, such as the methods of agreement, difference, and concomitant variation which are critical to the
scientific method The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific ...
.Goodman, Lenn Evan (2003), ''Islamic Humanism'', p. 155,
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
, .
One of Avicenna's ideas had a particularly important influence on Western logicians such as
William of Ockham William of Ockham, OFM (; also Occam, from la, Gulielmus Occamus; 1287 – 10 April 1347) was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small vil ...
: Avicenna's word for a meaning or notion (''ma'na''), was translated by the scholastic logicians as the Latin ''intentio''; in medieval logic and
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epis ...
, this is a sign in the mind that naturally represents a thing. This was crucial to the development of Ockham's
conceptualism In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical co ...
: A universal term (''e.g.,'' "man") does not signify a thing existing in reality, but rather a sign in the mind (''intentio in intellectu'') which represents many things in reality; Ockham cites Avicenna's commentary on ''Metaphysics'' V in support of this view. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (b. 1149) criticised Aristotle's " first figure" and formulated an early system of inductive logic, foreshadowing the system of inductive logic developed by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).
Muhammad Iqbal Sir Muhammad Iqbal ( ur, ; 9 November 187721 April 1938), was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, Quote: "In Persian, ... he published six volumes of mainly long poems between 1915 and 1936, ... more or less complete works on philos ...
, ''
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam ''The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam'' is a compilation of lectures delivered by Muhammad Iqbal on Islamic philosophy and published in 1930. These lectures were delivered by Iqbal in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh. The last chap ...
'', "The Spirit of Muslim Culture" (
cf. The abbreviation ''cf.'' (short for the la, confer/conferatur, both meaning "compare") is used in writing to refer the reader to other material to make a comparison with the topic being discussed. Style guides recommend that ''cf.'' be used onl ...
br>
an

Al-Razi's work was seen by later Islamic scholars as marking a new direction for Islamic logic, towards a Logic in Islamic philosophy#Post-Avicennian logic, Post-Avicennian logic. This was further elaborated by his student Afdaladdîn al-Khûnajî (d. 1249), who developed a form of logic revolving around the subject matter of
concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by ...
ions and assents. In response to this tradition, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274) began a tradition of Neo-Avicennian logic which remained faithful to Avicenna's work and existed as an alternative to the more dominant Post-Avicennian school over the following centuries. The Illuminationist school was founded by
Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi "Shihāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī ( fa, شهاب‌الدین سهروردی, also known as Sohrevardi) (1154–1191) was a PersianEdward Craig, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya (1154-91)" Ro ...
(1155–1191), who developed the idea of "decisive necessity", which refers to the reduction of all modalities (necessity,
possibility Possibility is the condition or fact of being possible. Latin origins of the word hint at ability. Possibility may refer to: * Probability, the measure of the likelihood that an event will occur * Epistemic possibility, a topic in philosophy ...
, contingency and
impossibility In contract law, impossibility is an excuse for the nonperformance of duties under a contract, based on a change in circumstances (or the discovery of preexisting circumstances), the nonoccurrence of which was an underlying assumption of the ...
) to the single mode of necessity. Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288) wrote a book on Avicennian logic, which was a commentary of Avicenna's ''Al-Isharat'' (''The Signs'') and ''Al-Hidayah'' (''The Guidance'').Dr. Abu Shadi Al-Roubi (1982), "Ibn Al-Nafis as a philosopher", ''Symposium on Ibn al-Nafis'', Second International Conference on Islamic Medicine: Islamic Medical Organization, Kuwait (
cf. The abbreviation ''cf.'' (short for the la, confer/conferatur, both meaning "compare") is used in writing to refer the reader to other material to make a comparison with the topic being discussed. Style guides recommend that ''cf.'' be used onl ...
br>Ibn al-Nafis As a Philosopher
, ''Encyclopedia of Islamic World'').
Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), wrote the ''Ar-Radd 'ala al-Mantiqiyyin'', where he argued against the usefulness, though not the validity, of the syllogism and in favour of inductive reasoning. Ibn Taymiyyah also argued against the certainty of syllogistic arguments and in favour of analogy; his argument is that concepts founded on
induction Induction, Inducible or Inductive may refer to: Biology and medicine * Labor induction (birth/pregnancy) * Induction chemotherapy, in medicine * Induced stem cells, stem cells derived from somatic, reproductive, pluripotent or other cell t ...
are themselves not certain but only probable, and thus a syllogism based on such concepts is no more certain than an argument based on analogy. He further claimed that induction itself is founded on a process of analogy. His model of analogical reasoning was based on that of juridical arguments., pp. 16-36 This model of analogy has been used in the recent work of John F. Sowa. The ''Sharh al-takmil fi'l-mantiq'' written by Muhammad ibn Fayd Allah ibn Muhammad Amin al-Sharwani in the 15th century is the last major Arabic work on logic that has been studied. However, "thousands upon thousands of pages" on logic were written between the 14th and 19th centuries, though only a fraction of the texts written during this period have been studied by historians, hence little is known about the original work on Islamic logic produced during this later period.


Logic in medieval Europe

"Medieval logic" (also known as "Scholastic logic") generally means the form of Aristotelian logic developed in
medieval Europe In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
throughout roughly the period 1200–1600. For centuries after Stoic logic had been formulated, it was the dominant system of logic in the classical world. When the study of logic resumed after the Dark Ages, the main source was the work of the Christian philosopher
Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius (; Latin: ''Boetius''; 480 – 524 AD), was a Roman senator, consul, ''magister officiorum'', historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the tr ...
, who was familiar with some of Aristotle's logic, but almost none of the work of the Stoics.Kneale p. 198 Until the twelfth century, the only works of Aristotle available in the West were the ''Categories'', ''On Interpretation'', and Boethius's translation of the
Isagoge The ''Isagoge'' ( el, Εἰσαγωγή, ''Eisagōgḗ''; ) or "Introduction" to Aristotle's "Categories", written by Porphyry in Greek and translated into Latin by Boethius, was the standard textbook on logic for at least a millennium after his ...
of Porphyry (a commentary on the Categories). These works were known as the "Old Logic" (''Logica Vetus'' or ''Ars Vetus''). An important work in this tradition was the ''Logica Ingredientibus'' of Peter Abelard (1079–1142). His direct influence was small, but his influence through pupils such as
John of Salisbury John of Salisbury (late 1110s – 25 October 1180), who described himself as Johannes Parvus ("John the Little"), was an English author, philosopher, educationalist, diplomat and bishop of Chartres. Early life and education Born at Salisbury, E ...
was great, and his method of applying rigorous logical analysis to theology shaped the way that theological criticism developed in the period that followed. The proof for the
principle of explosion In classical logic, intuitionistic logic and similar logical systems, the principle of explosion (, 'from falsehood, anything ollows; or ), or the principle of Pseudo-Scotus, is the law according to which any statement can be proven from a ...
, also known as the principle of seudo-Scotus, the law according to which any proposition can be proven from a contradiction (including its negation), was first given by the 12th century French logician William of Soissons. By the early thirteenth century, the remaining works of Aristotle's ''Organon'', including the '' Prior Analytics'', '' Posterior Analytics'', and the ''
Sophistical Refutations ''Sophistical Refutations'' ( el, Σοφιστικοὶ Ἔλεγχοι, Sophistikoi Elenchoi; la, De Sophisticis Elenchis) is a text in Aristotle's ''Organon'' in which he identified thirteen fallacies.Sometimes listed as twelve. According to A ...
'' (collectively known as the '' Logica Nova'' or "New Logic"), had been recovered in the West. Logical work until then was mostly paraphrasis or commentary on the work of Aristotle. The period from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century was one of significant developments in logic, particularly in three areas which were original, with little foundation in the Aristotelian tradition that came before. These were: * The theory of supposition. Supposition theory deals with the way that predicates (''e.g.,'' 'man') range over a domain of individuals (''e.g.,'' all men). In the proposition 'every man is an animal', does the term 'man' range over or 'supposit for' men existing just in the present, or does the range include past and future men? Can a term supposit for a non-existing individual? Some medievalists have argued that this idea is a precursor of modern
first-order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
. "The theory of supposition with the associated theories of ''copulatio'' (sign-capacity of adjectival terms), ''ampliatio'' (widening of referential domain), and ''distributio'' constitute one of the most original achievements of Western medieval logic". * The theory of syncategoremata. Syncategoremata are terms which are necessary for logic, but which, unlike ''categorematic'' terms, do not signify on their own behalf, but 'co-signify' with other words. Examples of syncategoremata are 'and', 'not', 'every', 'if', and so on. * The theory of
consequences Consequence may refer to: * Logical consequence, also known as a ''consequence relation'', or ''entailment'' * In operant conditioning, a result of some behavior * Consequentialism, a theory in philosophy in which the morality of an act is determi ...
. A consequence is a hypothetical, conditional proposition: two propositions joined by the terms 'if ... then'. For example, 'if a man runs, then God exists' (''Si homo currit, Deus est''). A fully developed theory of consequences is given in Book III of
William of Ockham William of Ockham, OFM (; also Occam, from la, Gulielmus Occamus; 1287 – 10 April 1347) was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small vil ...
's work
Summa Logicae The ''Summa Logicae'' ("Sum of Logic") is a textbook on logic by William of Ockham. It was written around 1323. Systematically, it resembles other works of medieval logic, organised under the basic headings of the Aristotelian Predicables, Cat ...
. There, Ockham distinguishes between 'material' and 'formal' consequences, which are roughly equivalent to the modern material implication and
logical implication Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one ...
respectively. Similar accounts are given by
Jean Buridan Jean Buridan (; Latin: ''Johannes Buridanus''; – ) was an influential 14th-century French philosopher. Buridan was a teacher in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career who focused in particular on logic and the wor ...
and
Albert of Saxony en, Frederick Augustus Albert Anthony Ferdinand Joseph Charles Maria Baptist Nepomuk William Xavier George Fidelis , image = Albert of Saxony by Nicola Perscheid c1900.jpg , image_size = , caption = Photograph by Nicola Persch ...
. The last great works in this tradition are the ''Logic'' of John Poinsot (1589–1644, known as John of St Thomas), the ''Metaphysical Disputations'' of
Francisco Suarez Francisco is the Spanish and Portuguese form of the masculine given name ''Franciscus''. Nicknames In Spanish, people with the name Francisco are sometimes nicknamed "Paco". San Francisco de Asís was known as ''Pater Comunitatis'' (father of ...
(1548–1617), and the ''Logica Demonstrativa'' of
Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (; 5 September 1667 – 25 October 1733) was an Italian Jesuit priest, scholastic philosopher, and mathematician. Saccheri was born in Sanremo. He entered the Jesuit order in 1685 and was ordained as a priest in 1694 ...
(1667–1733).


Traditional logic


The textbook tradition

''Traditional logic'' generally means the textbook tradition that begins with
Antoine Arnauld Antoine Arnauld (6 February 16128 August 1694) was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Cont ...
's and
Pierre Nicole Pierre Nicole (19 October 1625 – 16 November 1695) was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists. Life Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education. Sent to Paris in 1642 to study t ...
's ''Logic, or the Art of Thinking'', better known as the ''
Port-Royal Logic ''Port-Royal Logic'', or ''Logique de Port-Royal'', is the common name of ''La logique, ou l'art de penser'', an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, two prominent members of the Jan ...
''. Published in 1662, it was the most influential work on logic after Aristotle until the nineteenth century.Buroker xxiii The book presents a loosely Cartesian doctrine (that the proposition is a combining of ideas rather than terms, for example) within a framework that is broadly derived from Aristotelian and medieval
term logic In philosophy, term logic, also known as traditional logic, syllogistic logic or Aristotelian logic, is a loose name for an approach to formal logic that began with Aristotle and was developed further in ancient history mostly by his followers, ...
. Between 1664 and 1700, there were eight editions, and the book had considerable influence after that. The Port-Royal introduces the concepts of extension and intension. The account of
proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
s that Locke gives in the ''Essay'' is essentially that of the Port-Royal: "Verbal propositions, which are words, rethe signs of our ideas, put together or separated in affirmative or negative sentences. So that proposition consists in the putting together or separating these signs, according as the things which they stand for agree or disagree."
Dudley Fenner Dudley Fenner (1587) was an English puritan divine. He helped popularise Ramist logic in the English language. Fenner was also one of the first theologians to use the term "covenant of works" to describe God's relationship with Adam in the ''Bo ...
helped popularize
Ramist Ramism was a collection of theories on rhetoric, logic, and pedagogy based on the teachings of Petrus Ramus, a French academic, philosopher, and Huguenot convert, who was murdered during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in August 1572. Acco ...
logic, a reaction against Aristotle. Another influential work was the ''
Novum Organum The ''Novum Organum'', fully ''Novum Organum, sive Indicia Vera de Interpretatione Naturae'' ("New organon, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature") or ''Instaurationis Magnae, Pars II'' ("Part II of The Great Instauration ...
'' by
Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
, published in 1620. The title translates as "new instrument". This is a reference to
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
's work known as the ''
Organon The ''Organon'' ( grc, Ὄργανον, meaning "instrument, tool, organ") is the standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name ''Organon'' was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics. The six ...
''. In this work, Bacon rejects the syllogistic method of Aristotle in favor of an alternative procedure "which by slow and faithful toil gathers information from things and brings it into understanding". This method is known as inductive reasoning, a method which starts from empirical observation and proceeds to lower axioms or propositions; from these lower axioms, more general ones can be induced. For example, in finding the cause of a ''phenomenal nature'' such as heat, 3 lists should be constructed: * The presence list: a list of every situation where heat is found. * The absence list: a list of every situation that is similar to at least one of those of the presence list, except for the lack of heat. * The variability list: a list of every situation where heat can vary. Then, the ''form nature'' (or cause) of heat may be defined as that which is common to every situation of the presence list, and which is lacking from every situation of the absence list, and which varies by degree in every situation of the variability list. Other works in the textbook tradition include
Isaac Watts Isaac Watts (17 July 1674 – 25 November 1748) was an English Congregational minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician. He was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns. His works include "When I Survey the ...
's ''Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason'' (1725), Richard Whately's ''Logic'' (1826), and John Stuart Mill's ''A System of Logic'' (1843). Although the latter was one of the last great works in the tradition, Mill's view that the foundations of logic lie in introspection influenced the view that logic is best understood as a branch of psychology, a view which dominated the next fifty years of its development, especially in Germany.


Logic in Hegel's philosophy

G.W.F. Hegel indicated the importance of logic to his philosophical system when he condensed his extensive ''
Science of Logic ''Science of Logic'' (''SL''; german: Wissenschaft der Logik, ''WdL''), first published between 1812 and 1816, is the work in which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel outlined his vision of logic. Hegel's logic is a system of '' dialectics'', i.e., ...
'' into a shorter work published in 1817 as the first volume of his ''Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.'' The "Shorter" or "Encyclopaedia" ''Logic'', as it is often known, lays out a series of transitions which leads from the most empty and abstract of categories—Hegel begins with "Pure Being" and "Pure Nothing"—to the " Absolute", the category which contains and resolves all the categories which preceded it. Despite the title, Hegel's ''Logic'' is not really a contribution to the science of valid inference. Rather than deriving conclusions about concepts through valid inference from premises, Hegel seeks to show that thinking about one concept compels thinking about another concept (one cannot, he argues, possess the concept of "Quality" without the concept of "Quantity"); this compulsion is, supposedly, not a matter of individual psychology, because it arises almost organically from the content of the concepts themselves. His purpose is to show the rational structure of the "Absolute"—indeed of rationality itself. The method by which thought is driven from one concept to its contrary, and then to further concepts, is known as the Hegelian dialectic. Although Hegel's ''Logic'' has had little impact on mainstream logical studies, its influence can be seen elsewhere: * Carl von Prantl's ''Geschichte der Logik im Abendland'' (1855–1867). * The work of the British Idealists, such as F.H. Bradley's ''Principles of Logic'' (1883). * The economic, political, and philosophical studies of
Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
, and in the various schools of
Marxism Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
.


Logic and psychology

Between the work of Mill and Frege stretched half a century during which logic was widely treated as a descriptive science, an empirical study of the structure of reasoning, and thus essentially as a branch of
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
. The German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, for example, discussed deriving "the logical from the psychological laws of thought", emphasizing that "psychological thinking is always the more comprehensive form of thinking." This view was widespread among German philosophers of the period: *
Theodor Lipps Theodor Lipps (; 28 July 1851 – 17 October 1914) was a German philosopher, famed for his theory regarding aesthetics, creating the framework for the concept of ''Einfühlung'' (empathy)'','' defined as, "projecting oneself onto the object of ...
described logic as "a specific discipline of psychology". *
Christoph von Sigwart Christoph von Sigwart (28 March 1830 – 4 August 1904) was a German philosopher and logician. He was the son of philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart (31 August 1789 – 16 November 1844). Life After a course of philosophy ...
understood logical necessity as grounded in the individual's compulsion to think in a certain way. * Benno Erdmann argued that "logical laws only hold within the limits of our thinking". Such was the dominant view of logic in the years following Mill's work. This psychological approach to logic was rejected by
Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
. It was also subjected to an extended and destructive critique by
Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...
in the first volume of his ''Logical Investigations'' (1900), an assault which has been described as "overwhelming". Husserl argued forcefully that grounding logic in psychological observations implied that all logical truths remained unproven, and that
skepticism Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the p ...
and
relativism Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...
were unavoidable consequences. Such criticisms did not immediately extirpate what is called "
psychologism Psychologism is a family of philosophical positions, according to which certain psychological facts, laws, or entities play a central role in grounding or explaining certain non-psychological facts, laws, or entities. The word was coined by Johan ...
". For example, the American philosopher
Josiah Royce Josiah Royce (; November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916) was an American objective idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism. His philosophical ideas included his version of personalism, defense of absolutism, idealism and his ...
, while acknowledging the force of Husserl's critique, remained "unable to doubt" that progress in psychology would be accompanied by progress in logic, and vice versa.


Rise of modern logic

The period between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century had been largely one of decline and neglect, and is generally regarded as barren by historians of logic. The revival of logic occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, at the beginning of a revolutionary period where the subject developed into a rigorous and formalistic discipline whose exemplar was the exact method of proof used in mathematics. The development of the modern "symbolic" or "mathematical" logic during this period is the most significant in the 2000-year history of logic, and is arguably one of the most important and remarkable events in human intellectual history. A number of features distinguish modern logic from the old Aristotelian or traditional logic, the most important of which are as follows: Modern logic is fundamentally a ''calculus'' whose rules of operation are determined only by the ''shape'' and not by the ''meaning'' of the symbols it employs, as in mathematics. Many logicians were impressed by the "success" of mathematics, in that there had been no prolonged dispute about any truly mathematical result. C.S. Peirce noted that even though a mistake in the evaluation of a definite integral by Laplace led to an error concerning the moon's orbit that persisted for nearly 50 years, the mistake, once spotted, was corrected without any serious dispute. Peirce contrasted this with the disputation and uncertainty surrounding traditional logic, and especially reasoning in
metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
. He argued that a truly "exact" logic would depend upon mathematical, i.e., "diagrammatic" or "iconic" thought. "Those who follow such methods will ... escape all error except such as will be speedily corrected after it is once suspected". Modern logic is also "constructive" rather than "abstractive"; i.e., rather than abstracting and formalising theorems derived from ordinary language (or from psychological intuitions about validity), it constructs theorems by formal methods, then looks for an interpretation in ordinary language. It is entirely symbolic, meaning that even the logical constants (which the medieval logicians called " syncategoremata") and the categoric terms are expressed in symbols.


Modern logic

The development of modern logic falls into roughly five periods: * The embryonic period from
Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ma ...
to 1847, when the notion of a logical calculus was discussed and developed, particularly by Leibniz, but no schools were formed, and isolated periodic attempts were abandoned or went unnoticed. * The algebraic period from Boole's Analysis to Schröder's ''Vorlesungen''. In this period, there were more practitioners, and a greater continuity of development. * The logicist period from the
Begriffsschrift ''Begriffsschrift'' (German for, roughly, "concept-script") is a book on logic by Gottlob Frege, published in 1879, and the formal system set out in that book. ''Begriffsschrift'' is usually translated as ''concept writing'' or ''concept notatio ...
of
Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
to the ''
Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
'' of Russell and Whitehead. The aim of the "logicist school" was to incorporate the logic of all mathematical and scientific discourse in a single unified system which, taking as a fundamental principle that all mathematical truths are logical, did not accept any non-logical terminology. The major logicists were
Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
, Russell, and the early
Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrians, Austrian-British people, British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy o ...
. It culminates with the ''Principia'', an important work which includes a thorough examination and attempted solution of the
antinomies Antinomy (Greek ἀντί, ''antí'', "against, in opposition to", and νόμος, ''nómos'', "law") refers to a real or apparent mutual incompatibility of two laws. It is a term used in logic and epistemology, particularly in the philosophy of I ...
which had been an obstacle to earlier progress. * The metamathematical period from 1910 to the 1930s, which saw the development of
metalogic Metalogic is the study of the metatheory of logic. Whereas ''logic'' studies how logical systems can be used to construct valid and sound arguments, metalogic studies the properties of logical systems.Harry GenslerIntroduction to Logic Routledge, ...
, in the finitist system of
Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many ...
, and the non-finitist system of Löwenheim and
Skolem Thoralf Albert Skolem (; 23 May 1887 – 23 March 1963) was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and set theory. Life Although Skolem's father was a primary school teacher, most of his extended family were farmers. Skolem ...
, the combination of logic and metalogic in the work of Gödel and Tarski. Gödel's
incompleteness theorem Complete may refer to: Logic * Completeness (logic) * Completeness of a theory, the property of a theory that every formula in the theory's language or its negation is provable Mathematics * The completeness of the real numbers, which implies t ...
of 1931 was one of the greatest achievements in the history of logic. Later in the 1930s, Gödel developed the notion of set-theoretic constructibility. * The period after World War II, when
mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...
branched into four inter-related but separate areas of research: model theory, proof theory, computability theory, and
set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
, and its ideas and methods began to influence philosophy.


Embryonic period

The idea that inference could be represented by a purely mechanical process is found as early as Raymond Llull, who proposed a (somewhat eccentric) method of drawing conclusions by a system of concentric rings. The work of logicians such as the Oxford Calculators led to a method of using letters instead of writing out logical calculations (''calculationes'') in words, a method used, for instance, in the ''Logica magna'' by
Paul of Venice Paul of Venice (or Paulus Venetus; 1369–1429) was a Catholic philosopher, theologian, logician and metaphysician of the Order of Saint Augustine. Life Paul was born, according to the chroniclers of his order, at Udine, about 1369 and died at V ...
. Three hundred years after Llull, the English philosopher and logician
Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influ ...
suggested that all logic and reasoning could be reduced to the mathematical operations of addition and subtraction. The same idea is found in the work of
Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ma ...
, who had read both Llull and Hobbes, and who argued that logic can be represented through a combinatorial process or calculus. But, like Llull and Hobbes, he failed to develop a detailed or comprehensive system, and his work on this topic was not published until long after his death. Leibniz says that ordinary languages are subject to "countless ambiguities" and are unsuited for a calculus, whose task is to expose mistakes in inference arising from the forms and structures of words; hence, he proposed to identify an
alphabet of human thought The alphabet of human thought ( la, alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) is a concept originally proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas and relationships by breaking down their component piec ...
comprising fundamental concepts which could be composed to express complex ideas, and create a ''
calculus ratiocinator The ''calculus ratiocinator'' is a theoretical universal logical calculation framework, a concept described in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, usually paired with his more frequently mentioned ''characteristica universalis'', a universal conce ...
'' that would make all arguments "as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate."
Gergonne Joseph Diez Gergonne (19 June 1771 at Nancy, France – 4 May 1859 at Montpellier, France) was a French mathematician and logician. Life In 1791, Gergonne enlisted in the French army as a captain. That army was undergoing rapid expansion becau ...
(1816) said that reasoning does not have to be about objects about which one has perfectly clear ideas, because algebraic operations can be carried out without having any idea of the meaning of the symbols involved.
Bolzano Bolzano ( or ; german: Bozen, (formerly ); bar, Bozn; lld, Balsan or ) is the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy. With a population of 108,245, Bolzano is also by far the largest city in South Tyrol and the third la ...
anticipated a fundamental idea of modern proof theory when he defined logical consequence or "deducibility" in terms of variables:
Hence I say that propositions M, N, O,… are ''deducible'' from propositions A, B, C, D,… with respect to variable parts i, j,…, if every class of ideas whose substitution for i, j,… makes all of A, B, C, D,… true, also makes all of M, N, O,… true. Occasionally, since it is customary, I shall say that propositions M, N, O,… ''follow'', or can be ''inferred'' or ''derived'', from A, B, C, D,…. Propositions A, B, C, D,… I shall call the ''premises'', M, N, O,… the ''conclusions.''
This is now known as semantic validity.


Algebraic period

Modern logic begins with what is known as the "algebraic school", originating with Boole and including Peirce, Jevons, Schröder, and
Venn Venn is a surname and a given name. It may refer to: Given name * Venn Eyre (died 1777), Archdeacon of Carlisle, Cumbria, England * Venn Pilcher (1879–1961), Anglican bishop, writer, and translator of hymns * Venn Young (1929–1993), New Zea ...
. Their objective was to develop a calculus to formalise reasoning in the area of classes, propositions, and probabilities. The school begins with Boole's seminal work ''Mathematical Analysis of Logic'' which appeared in 1847, although
De Morgan De Morgan or de Morgan is a surname, and may refer to: * Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), British mathematician and logician. ** De Morgan's laws (or De Morgan's theorem), a set of rules from propositional logic. ** The De Morgan Medal, a trien ...
(1847) is its immediate precursor. The fundamental idea of Boole's system is that algebraic formulae can be used to express logical relations. This idea occurred to Boole in his teenage years, working as an usher in a private school in Lincoln, Lincolnshire. For example, let x and y stand for classes, let the symbol ''='' signify that the classes have the same members, xy stand for the class containing all and only the members of x and y and so on. Boole calls these ''elective symbols'', i.e. symbols which select certain objects for consideration.Kneale p. 407 An expression in which elective symbols are used is called an ''elective function'', and an equation of which the members are elective functions, is an ''elective equation''. The theory of elective functions and their "development" is essentially the modern idea of
truth-function In logic, a truth function is a function that accepts truth values as input and produces a unique truth value as output. In other words: The input and output of a truth function are all truth values; a truth function will always output exactly on ...
s and their expression in
disjunctive normal form In boolean logic, a disjunctive normal form (DNF) is a canonical normal form of a logical formula consisting of a disjunction of conjunctions; it can also be described as an OR of ANDs, a sum of products, or (in philosophical logic) a ''cluster c ...
. Boole's system admits of two interpretations, in class logic, and propositional logic. Boole distinguished between "primary propositions" which are the subject of syllogistic theory, and "secondary propositions", which are the subject of propositional logic, and showed how under different "interpretations" the same algebraic system could represent both. An example of a primary proposition is "All inhabitants are either Europeans or Asiatics." An example of a secondary proposition is "Either all inhabitants are Europeans or they are all Asiatics." These are easily distinguished in modern predicate logic, where it is also possible to show that the first follows from the second, but it is a significant disadvantage that there is no way of representing this in the Boolean system. In his ''Symbolic Logic'' (1881),
John Venn John Venn, Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, FSA (4 August 1834 – 4 April 1923) was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in l ...
used diagrams of overlapping areas to express Boolean relations between classes or truth-conditions of propositions. In 1869 Jevons realised that Boole's methods could be mechanised, and constructed a "logical machine" which he showed to the
Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
the following year. In 1885
Allan Marquand Allan Marquand (; December 10, 1853 – September 24, 1924) was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum. Early life Marquand was born on December 10, 1853 in New York City. He was a son of ...
proposed an electrical version of the machine that is still extant
picture at the Firestone Library
. The defects in Boole's system (such as the use of the letter ''v'' for existential propositions) were all remedied by his followers. Jevons published ''Pure Logic, or the Logic of Quality apart from Quantity'' in 1864, where he suggested a symbol to signify
exclusive or Exclusive or or exclusive disjunction is a logical operation that is true if and only if its arguments differ (one is true, the other is false). It is symbolized by the prefix operator J and by the infix operators XOR ( or ), EOR, EXOR, , ...
, which allowed Boole's system to be greatly simplified. This was usefully exploited by Schröder when he set out theorems in parallel columns in his ''Vorlesungen'' (1890–1905). Peirce (1880) showed how all the Boolean elective functions could be expressed by the use of a single primitive binary operation, " neither ... nor ..." and equally well " not both ... and ...", however, like many of Peirce's innovations, this remained unknown or unnoticed until Sheffer rediscovered it in 1913. Boole's early work also lacks the idea of the logical sum which originates in Peirce (1867), Schröder (1877) and Jevons (1890), and the concept of
inclusion Inclusion or Include may refer to: Sociology * Social inclusion, aims to create an environment that supports equal opportunity for individuals and groups that form a society. ** Inclusion (disability rights), promotion of people with disabiliti ...
, first suggested by Gergonne (1816) and clearly articulated by Peirce (1870). The success of Boole's algebraic system suggested that all logic must be capable of algebraic representation, and there were attempts to express a logic of relations in such form, of which the most ambitious was Schröder's monumental ''Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik'' ("Lectures on the Algebra of Logic", vol iii 1895), although the original idea was again anticipated by Peirce. Boole's unwavering acceptance of Aristotle's logic is emphasized by the historian of logic John Corcoran in an accessible introduction to ''Laws of Thought'' Corcoran also wrote a point-by-point comparison of ''Prior Analytics'' and ''Laws of Thought''. According to Corcoran, Boole fully accepted and endorsed Aristotle's logic. Boole's goals were "to go under, over, and beyond" Aristotle's logic by 1) providing it with mathematical foundations involving equations, 2) extending the class of problems it could treat — from assessing validity to solving equations — and 3) expanding the range of applications it could handle — e.g. from propositions having only two terms to those having arbitrarily many. More specifically, Boole agreed with what
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
said; Boole's 'disagreements', if they might be called that, concern what Aristotle did not say. First, in the realm of foundations, Boole reduced the four propositional forms of Aristotelian logic to formulas in the form of equations — by itself a revolutionary idea. Second, in the realm of logic's problems, Boole's addition of equation solving to logic — another revolutionary idea — involved Boole's doctrine that Aristotle's rules of inference (the "perfect syllogisms") must be supplemented by rules for equation solving. Third, in the realm of applications, Boole's system could handle multi-term propositions and arguments whereas Aristotle could handle only two-termed subject-predicate propositions and arguments. For example, Aristotle's system could not deduce "No quadrangle that is a square is a rectangle that is a rhombus" from "No square that is a quadrangle is a rhombus that is a rectangle" or from "No rhombus that is a rectangle is a square that is a quadrangle".


Logicist period

After Boole, the next great advances were made by the German mathematician
Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
. Frege's objective was the program of
Logicism In the philosophy of mathematics, logicism is a programme comprising one or more of the theses that — for some coherent meaning of 'logic' — mathematics is an extension of logic, some or all of mathematics is reducible to logic, or some or all ...
, i.e. demonstrating that arithmetic is identical with logic.Kneale p. 435 Frege went much further than any of his predecessors in his rigorous and formal approach to logic, and his calculus or
Begriffsschrift ''Begriffsschrift'' (German for, roughly, "concept-script") is a book on logic by Gottlob Frege, published in 1879, and the formal system set out in that book. ''Begriffsschrift'' is usually translated as ''concept writing'' or ''concept notatio ...
is important. Frege also tried to show that the concept of
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
can be defined by purely logical means, so that (if he was right) logic includes arithmetic and all branches of mathematics that are reducible to arithmetic. He was not the first writer to suggest this. In his pioneering work ''Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik'' (The Foundations of Arithmetic), sections 15–17, he acknowledges the efforts of Leibniz, J.S. Mill as well as Jevons, citing the latter's claim that "algebra is a highly developed logic, and number but logical discrimination." Frege's first work, the ''Begriffsschrift'' ("concept script") is a rigorously axiomatised system of propositional logic, relying on just two connectives (negational and conditional), two rules of inference (''modus ponens'' and substitution), and six axioms. Frege referred to the "completeness" of this system, but was unable to prove this. The most significant innovation, however, was his explanation of the quantifier in terms of mathematical functions. Traditional logic regards the sentence "Caesar is a man" as of fundamentally the same form as "all men are mortal." Sentences with a proper name subject were regarded as universal in character, interpretable as "every Caesar is a man". At the outset Frege abandons the traditional "concepts ''subject'' and ''predicate''", replacing them with ''argument'' and ''function'' respectively, which he believes "will stand the test of time. It is easy to see how regarding a content as a function of an argument leads to the formation of concepts. Furthermore, the demonstration of the connection between the meanings of the words ''if, and, not, or, there is, some, all,'' and so forth, deserves attention". Frege argued that the quantifier expression "all men" does not have the same logical or semantic form as "all men", and that the universal proposition "every A is B" is a complex proposition involving two ''functions'', namely ' – is A' and ' – is B' such that whatever satisfies the first, also satisfies the second. In modern notation, this would be expressed as : \forall \; x \big( A(x) \rightarrow B (x) \big) In English, "for all x, if Ax then Bx". Thus only singular propositions are of subject-predicate form, and they are irreducibly singular, i.e. not reducible to a general proposition. Universal and particular propositions, by contrast, are not of simple subject-predicate form at all. If "all mammals" were the logical subject of the sentence "all mammals are land-dwellers", then to negate the whole sentence we would have to negate the predicate to give "all mammals are ''not'' land-dwellers". But this is not the case. This functional analysis of ordinary-language sentences later had a great impact on philosophy and
linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
. This means that in Frege's calculus, Boole's "primary" propositions can be represented in a different way from "secondary" propositions. "All inhabitants are either men or women" is : \forall \; x \Big( I(x) \rightarrow \big( M(x) \lor W(x) \big) \Big) whereas "All the inhabitants are men or all the inhabitants are women" is : \forall \; x \big( I(x) \rightarrow M(x) \big) \lor \forall \;x \big( I(x) \rightarrow W(x) \big) As Frege remarked in a critique of Boole's calculus: : "The real difference is that I avoid he Booleandivision into two parts ... and give a homogeneous presentation of the lot. In Boole the two parts run alongside one another, so that one is like the mirror image of the other, but for that very reason stands in no organic relation to it' As well as providing a unified and comprehensive system of logic, Frege's calculus also resolved the ancient
problem of multiple generality The problem of multiple generality names a failure in traditional logic to describe certain intuitively valid inferences. For example, it is intuitively clear that if: :''Some cat is feared by every mouse'' then it follows logically that: :''All m ...
. The ambiguity of "every girl kissed a boy" is difficult to express in traditional logic, but Frege's logic resolves this through the different scope of the quantifiers. Thus :\forall \; x \Big( G(x) \rightarrow \exists \; y \big( B(y) \land K(x,y) \big) \Big) means that to every girl there corresponds some boy (any one will do) who the girl kissed. But :\exists \;x \Big( B(x) \land \forall \;y \big( G(y) \rightarrow K(y, x) \big) \Big) means that there is some particular boy whom every girl kissed. Without this device, the project of logicism would have been doubtful or impossible. Using it, Frege provided a definition of the ancestral relation, of the
many-to-one relation In mathematics, a binary relation associates elements of one set, called the ''domain'', with elements of another set, called the ''codomain''. A binary relation over sets and is a new set of ordered pairs consisting of elements in and ...
, and of
mathematical induction Mathematical induction is a method for proving that a statement ''P''(''n'') is true for every natural number ''n'', that is, that the infinitely many cases ''P''(0), ''P''(1), ''P''(2), ''P''(3), ...  all hold. Informal metaphors help ...
. This period overlaps with the work of what is known as the "mathematical school", which included
Dedekind Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind (6 October 1831 – 12 February 1916) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, abstract algebra (particularly ring theory), and the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic. His ...
, Pasch,
Peano Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The sta ...
,
Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many ...
,
Zermelo Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo (, ; 27 July 187121 May 1953) was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic se ...
, Huntington, Veblen and
Heyting __NOTOC__ Arend Heyting (; 9 May 1898 – 9 July 1980) was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a foot ...
. Their objective was the axiomatisation of branches of mathematics like geometry, arithmetic, analysis and set theory. Most notable was
Hilbert's Program In mathematics, Hilbert's program, formulated by German mathematician David Hilbert in the early part of the 20th century, was a proposed solution to the foundational crisis of mathematics, when early attempts to clarify the foundations of mathema ...
, which sought to ground all of mathematics to a finite set of axioms, proving its consistency by "finitistic" means and providing a procedure which would decide the truth or falsity of any mathematical statement. The standard axiomatization of the
natural number In mathematics, the natural numbers are those numbers used for counting (as in "there are ''six'' coins on the table") and ordering (as in "this is the ''third'' largest city in the country"). Numbers used for counting are called ''cardinal ...
s is named the
Peano axioms In mathematical logic, the Peano axioms, also known as the Dedekind–Peano axioms or the Peano postulates, are axioms for the natural numbers presented by the 19th century Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano. These axioms have been used nearly ...
eponymously. Peano maintained a clear distinction between mathematical and logical symbols. While unaware of Frege's work, he independently recreated his logical apparatus based on the work of Boole and Schröder. The logicist project received a near-fatal setback with the discovery of a paradox in 1901 by
Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
. This proved Frege's naive set theory led to a contradiction. Frege's theory contained the axiom that for any formal criterion, there is a set of all objects that meet the criterion. Russell showed that a set containing exactly the sets that are not members of themselves would contradict its own definition (if it is not a member of itself, it is a member of itself, and if it is a member of itself, it is not). This contradiction is now known as
Russell's paradox In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox discovered by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains ...
. One important method of resolving this paradox was proposed by
Ernst Zermelo Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo (, ; 27 July 187121 May 1953) was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic se ...
.
Zermelo set theory Zermelo set theory (sometimes denoted by Z-), as set out in a seminal paper in 1908 by Ernst Zermelo, is the ancestor of modern Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF) and its extensions, such as von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG). It be ...
was the first axiomatic set theory. It was developed into the now-canonical
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory In set theory, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, named after mathematicians Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, is an axiomatic system that was proposed in the early twentieth century in order to formulate a theory of sets free of paradoxes such ...
(ZF). Russell's paradox symbolically is as follows: :\text R = \ \text R \in R \iff R \not \in R The monumental
Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
, a three-volume work on the
foundations of mathematics Foundations of mathematics is the study of the philosophical and logical and/or algorithmic basis of mathematics, or, in a broader sense, the mathematical investigation of what underlies the philosophical theories concerning the nature of mathe ...
, written by Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and published 1910–13 also included an attempt to resolve the paradox, by means of an elaborate system of types: a set of elements is of a different type than is each of its elements (set is not the element; one element is not the set) and one cannot speak of the "
set of all sets In set theory, a universal set is a set which contains all objects, including itself. In set theory as usually formulated, it can be proven in multiple ways that a universal set does not exist. However, some non-standard variants of set theory inc ...
". The ''Principia'' was an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and
inference rule In the philosophy of logic, a rule of inference, inference rule or transformation rule is a logical form consisting of a function which takes premises, analyzes their syntax, and returns a conclusion (or conclusions). For example, the rule of ...
s in symbolic logic.


Metamathematical period

The names of Gödel and Tarski dominate the 1930s, a crucial period in the development of metamathematics – the study of mathematics using mathematical methods to produce metatheories, or mathematical theories about other mathematical theories. Early investigations into metamathematics had been driven by Hilbert's program. Work on metamathematics culminated in the work of Gödel, who in 1929 showed that a given first-order sentence is deducible if and only if it is logically valid – i.e. it is true in every structure for its language. This is known as
Gödel's completeness theorem Gödel's completeness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic that establishes a correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in first-order logic. The completeness theorem applies to any first-order theory: ...
. A year later, he proved two important theorems, which showed Hibert's program to be unattainable in its original form. The first is that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure such as an
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
or computer program is capable of proving all facts about the
natural number In mathematics, the natural numbers are those numbers used for counting (as in "there are ''six'' coins on the table") and ordering (as in "this is the ''third'' largest city in the country"). Numbers used for counting are called ''cardinal ...
s. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second is that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic facts about the natural numbers, then the system cannot prove the consistency of the system itself. These two results are known as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, or simply ''Gödel's Theorem''. Later in the decade, Gödel developed the concept of set-theoretic constructibility, as part of his proof that the
axiom of choice In mathematics, the axiom of choice, or AC, is an axiom of set theory equivalent to the statement that ''a Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty''. Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collection ...
and the
continuum hypothesis In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states that or equivalently, that In Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC), this is equivalent to ...
are consistent with
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory In set theory, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, named after mathematicians Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, is an axiomatic system that was proposed in the early twentieth century in order to formulate a theory of sets free of paradoxes such ...
. In proof theory,
Gerhard Gentzen Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen (24 November 1909 – 4 August 1945) was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died ...
developed
natural deduction In logic and proof theory, natural deduction is a kind of proof calculus in which logical reasoning is expressed by inference rules closely related to the "natural" way of reasoning. This contrasts with Hilbert-style systems, which instead use ax ...
and the
sequent calculus In mathematical logic, sequent calculus is a style of formal logical argumentation in which every line of a proof is a conditional tautology (called a sequent by Gerhard Gentzen) instead of an unconditional tautology. Each conditional tautology i ...
. The former attempts to model logical reasoning as it 'naturally' occurs in practice and is most easily applied to
intuitionistic logic Intuitionistic logic, sometimes more generally called constructive logic, refers to systems of symbolic logic that differ from the systems used for classical logic by more closely mirroring the notion of constructive proof. In particular, systems ...
, while the latter was devised to clarify the derivation of logical proofs in any formal system. Since Gentzen's work, natural deduction and sequent calculi have been widely applied in the fields of proof theory, mathematical logic and computer science. Gentzen also proved normalization and cut-elimination theorems for intuitionistic and classical logic which could be used to reduce logical proofs to a normal form.
Alfred Tarski Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician a ...
, a pupil of Łukasiewicz, is best known for his definition of truth and logical consequence, and the semantic concept of logical satisfaction. In 1933, he published (in Polish) ''The concept of truth in formalized languages'', in which he proposed his
semantic theory of truth A semantic theory of truth is a theory of truth in the philosophy of language which holds that truth is a property of sentences. Origin The semantic conception of truth, which is related in different ways to both the correspondence and deflati ...
: a sentence such as "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Tarski's theory separated the metalanguage, which makes the statement about truth, from the object language, which contains the sentence whose truth is being asserted, and gave a correspondence (the
T-schema The T-schema ("truth schema", not to be confused with " Convention T") is used to check if an inductive definition of truth is valid, which lies at the heart of any realisation of Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth. Some authors refer to it ...
) between phrases in the object language and elements of an interpretation. Tarski's approach to the difficult idea of explaining truth has been enduringly influential in logic and philosophy, especially in the development of model theory. Tarski also produced important work on the methodology of deductive systems, and on fundamental principles such as completeness, decidability,
consistency In classical deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic definition states that a theory is consistent ...
and definability. According to Anita Feferman, Tarski "changed the face of logic in the twentieth century".
Alonzo Church Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scien ...
and
Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...
proposed formal models of computability, giving independent negative solutions to Hilbert's ''
Entscheidungsproblem In mathematics and computer science, the ' (, ) is a challenge posed by David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann in 1928. The problem asks for an algorithm that considers, as input, a statement and answers "Yes" or "No" according to whether the state ...
'' in 1936 and 1937, respectively. The ''Entscheidungsproblem'' asked for a procedure that, given any formal mathematical statement, would algorithmically determine whether the statement is true. Church and Turing proved there is no such procedure; Turing's paper introduced the
halting problem In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a ...
as a key example of a mathematical problem without an algorithmic solution. Church's system for computation developed into the modern
λ-calculus Lambda calculus (also written as ''λ''-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation tha ...
, while the
Turing machine A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
became a standard model for a general-purpose computing device. It was soon shown that many other proposed models of computation were equivalent in power to those proposed by Church and Turing. These results led to the Church–Turing thesis that any deterministic
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
that can be carried out by a human can be carried out by a Turing machine. Church proved additional undecidability results, showing that both Peano arithmetic and
first-order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
are undecidable. Later work by
Emil Post Emil Leon Post (; February 11, 1897 – April 21, 1954) was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Life Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Gove ...
and
Stephen Cole Kleene Stephen Cole Kleene ( ; January 5, 1909 – January 25, 1994) was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of ...
in the 1940s extended the scope of computability theory and introduced the concept of degrees of unsolvability. The results of the first few decades of the twentieth century also had an impact upon analytic philosophy and philosophical logic, particularly from the 1950s onwards, in subjects such as modal logic,
temporal logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...
,
deontic logic Deontic logic is the field of philosophical logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. It ...
, and
relevance logic Relevance logic, also called relevant logic, is a kind of non-classical logic requiring the antecedent and consequent of implications to be relevantly related. They may be viewed as a family of substructural or modal logics. It is generally, but ...
.


Logic after WWII

After World War II,
mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...
branched into four inter-related but separate areas of research: model theory, proof theory, computability theory, and
set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
. In set theory, the method of forcing revolutionized the field by providing a robust method for constructing models and obtaining independence results.
Paul Cohen Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007) was an American mathematician. He is best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was award ...
introduced this method in 1963 to prove the independence of the
continuum hypothesis In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states that or equivalently, that In Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC), this is equivalent to ...
and the
axiom of choice In mathematics, the axiom of choice, or AC, is an axiom of set theory equivalent to the statement that ''a Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty''. Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collection ...
from
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory In set theory, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, named after mathematicians Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, is an axiomatic system that was proposed in the early twentieth century in order to formulate a theory of sets free of paradoxes such ...
. His technique, which was simplified and extended soon after its introduction, has since been applied to many other problems in all areas of mathematical logic. Computability theory had its roots in the work of Turing, Church, Kleene, and Post in the 1930s and 40s. It developed into a study of abstract computability, which became known as
recursion theory Computability theory, also known as recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has sinc ...
. The
priority method In computer science and mathematical logic the Turing degree (named after Alan Turing) or degree of unsolvability of a set of natural numbers measures the level of algorithmic unsolvability of the set. Overview The concept of Turing degree is fund ...
, discovered independently by Albert Muchnik and Richard Friedberg in the 1950s, led to major advances in the understanding of the degrees of unsolvability and related structures. Research into higher-order computability theory demonstrated its connections to set theory. The fields of
constructive analysis In mathematics, constructive analysis is mathematical analysis done according to some principles of constructive mathematics. This contrasts with ''classical analysis'', which (in this context) simply means analysis done according to the (more com ...
and
computable analysis In mathematics and computer science, computable analysis is the study of mathematical analysis from the perspective of computability theory. It is concerned with the parts of real analysis and functional analysis that can be carried out in a co ...
were developed to study the effective content of classical mathematical theorems; these in turn inspired the program of
reverse mathematics Reverse mathematics is a program in mathematical logic that seeks to determine which axioms are required to prove theorems of mathematics. Its defining method can briefly be described as "going backwards from the theorems to the axioms", in cont ...
. A separate branch of computability theory,
computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved ...
, was also characterized in logical terms as a result of investigations into
descriptive complexity ''Descriptive Complexity'' is a book in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory by Neil Immerman. It concerns descriptive complexity theory, an area in which the expressibility of mathematical properties using different types of lo ...
. Model theory applies the methods of mathematical logic to study models of particular mathematical theories. Alfred Tarski published much pioneering work in the field, which is named after a series of papers he published under the title ''Contributions to the theory of models''. In the 1960s,
Abraham Robinson Abraham Robinson (born Robinsohn; October 6, 1918 – April 11, 1974) was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of nonstandard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were reincorp ...
used model-theoretic techniques to develop calculus and analysis based on
infinitesimals In mathematics, an infinitesimal number is a quantity that is closer to zero than any standard real number, but that is not zero. The word ''infinitesimal'' comes from a 17th-century Modern Latin coinage ''infinitesimus'', which originally refer ...
, a problem that first had been proposed by Leibniz. In proof theory, the relationship between classical mathematics and intuitionistic mathematics was clarified via tools such as the
realizability In mathematical logic, realizability is a collection of methods in proof theory used to study constructive proofs and extract additional information from them. Formulas from a formal theory are "realized" by objects, known as "realizers", in a way ...
method invented by Georg Kreisel and Gödel's ''Dialectica'' interpretation. This work inspired the contemporary area of
proof mining In proof theory, a branch of mathematical logic, proof mining (or proof unwinding) is a research program that studies or analyzes formalized proofs, especially in analysis, to obtain explicit bounds, ranges In the Hebrew Bible and in the Old Test ...
. The Curry–Howard correspondence emerged as a deep analogy between logic and computation, including a correspondence between systems of natural deduction and typed lambda calculi used in computer science. As a result, research into this class of formal systems began to address both logical and computational aspects; this area of research came to be known as modern type theory. Advances were also made in
ordinal analysis In proof theory, ordinal analysis assigns ordinals (often large countable ordinals) to mathematical theories as a measure of their strength. If theories have the same proof-theoretic ordinal they are often equiconsistent, and if one theory h ...
and the study of independence results in arithmetic such as the
Paris–Harrington theorem In mathematical logic, the Paris–Harrington theorem states that a certain combinatorial principle in Ramsey theory, namely the strengthened finite Ramsey theorem, is true, but not provable in Peano arithmetic. This has been described by some (suc ...
. This was also a period, particularly in the 1950s and afterwards, when the ideas of mathematical logic begin to influence philosophical thinking. For example,
tense logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...
is a formalised system for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time. The philosopher
Arthur Prior Arthur Norman Prior (4 December 1914 – 6 October 1969), usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contribution ...
played a significant role in its development in the 1960s. Modal logics extend the scope of formal logic to include the elements of
modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modaliti ...
(for example,
possibility Possibility is the condition or fact of being possible. Latin origins of the word hint at ability. Possibility may refer to: * Probability, the measure of the likelihood that an event will occur * Epistemic possibility, a topic in philosophy ...
and
necessity Necessary or necessity may refer to: * Need ** An action somebody may feel they must do ** An important task or essential thing to do at a particular time or by a particular moment * Necessary and sufficient condition, in logic, something that i ...
). The ideas of
Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and em ...
, particularly about
possible world A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their me ...
s, and the formal system now called
Kripke semantics Kripke semantics (also known as relational semantics or frame semantics, and often confused with possible world semantics) is a formal semantics for non-classical logic systems created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Saul Kripke and André Jo ...
have had a profound impact on analytic philosophy. His best known and most influential work is ''
Naming and Necessity ''Naming and Necessity'' is a 1980 book with the transcript of three lectures, given by the philosopher Saul Kripke, at Princeton University in 1970, in which he dealt with the debates of proper names in the philosophy of language. The transcript ...
'' (1980).See ''Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning'', Scott Soames: "''Naming and Necessity'' is among the most important works ever, ranking with the classical work of Frege in the late nineteenth century, and of Russell, Tarski and Wittgenstein in the first half of the twentieth century". Cited in Byrne, Alex and Hall, Ned. 2004. 'Necessary Truths'. ''Boston Review'' October/November 2004
Deontic logic Deontic logic is the field of philosophical logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. It ...
s are closely related to modal logics: they attempt to capture the logical features of
obligation An obligation is a course of action that someone is required to take, whether legal or moral. Obligations are constraints; they limit freedom. People who are under obligations may choose to freely act under obligations. Obligation exists when the ...
, permission and related concepts. Although some basic novelties syncretizing mathematical and philosophical logic were shown by
Bolzano Bolzano ( or ; german: Bozen, (formerly ); bar, Bozn; lld, Balsan or ) is the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy. With a population of 108,245, Bolzano is also by far the largest city in South Tyrol and the third la ...
in the early 1800s, it was
Ernst Mally Ernst Mally (; ; 11 October 1879 – 8 March 1944) was an Austrian analytic philosopher, initially affiliated with Alexius Meinong's Graz School of object theory. Mally was one of the founders of deontic logic and is mainly known for his contrib ...
, a pupil of
Alexius Meinong Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handschuchsheim (17 July 1853 – 27 November 1920) was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology. He also made contributions to philosophy of mind and theory of value. Life Alexius Meinong ...
, who was to propose the first formal deontic system in his ''Grundgesetze des Sollens'', based on the syntax of Whitehead's and Russell's
propositional calculus Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations ...
. Another logical system founded after World War II was fuzzy logic by Azerbaijani mathematician
Lotfi Asker Zadeh Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh (; az, Lütfi Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə; fa, لطفی علی‌عسکرزاده; 4 February 1921 – 6 September 2017) was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, an ...
in 1965.


See also

* History of deductive reasoning * History of inductive reasoning * History of abductive reasoning *
History of the function concept The mathematical concept of a function emerged in the 17th century in connection with the development of the calculus; for example, the slope \operatorname\!y/\operatorname\!x of a graph at a point was regarded as a function of the ''x''-coordina ...
*
History of Mathematics The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments ...
* History of Philosophy *
Plato's beard In metaphysics, Plato's beard is a paradoxical argument dubbed by Willard Van Orman Quine in his 1948 paper "On What There Is". The phrase came to be identified as the philosophy of understanding something based on what does not exist. Doctrine ...
* Timeline of mathematical logic


Notes


References

; Primary Sources *
Alexander of Aphrodisias Alexander of Aphrodisias ( grc-gre, Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Ἀφροδισιεύς, translit=Alexandros ho Aphrodisieus; AD) was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle ...
, ''In Aristotelis An. Pr. Lib. I Commentarium'', ed. Wallies, Berlin, C.I.A.G. vol. II/1, 1882. * Avicenna, ''Avicennae Opera'' Venice 1508. *
Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known as Boethius (; Latin: ''Boetius''; 480 – 524 AD), was a Roman senator, consul, ''magister officiorum'', historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the tr ...
''Commentary on the Perihermenias'', Secunda Editio, ed. Meiser, Leipzig, Teubner, 1880. * Bolzano, Bernard ''Wissenschaftslehre'', (1837) 4 Bde, Neudr., hrsg. W. Schultz, Leipzig I-II 1929, III 1930, IV 1931 (''Theory of Science'', four volumes, translated by Rolf George and Paul Rusnock, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). * Bolzano, Bernard ''Theory of Science'' (Edited, with an introduction, by Jan Berg. Translated from the German by Burnham Terrell – D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht and Boston 1973). * Boole, George (1847) ''The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'' (Cambridge and London); repr. in ''Studies in Logic and Probability'', ed. R. Rhees (London 1952). * Boole, George (1854) ''The Laws of Thought'' (London and Cambridge); repr. as ''Collected Logical Works''. Vol. 2, (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1940). *
Epictetus Epictetus (; grc-gre, Ἐπίκτητος, ''Epíktētos''; 50 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when ...
, ''Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae'', edited by Heinrich Schenkl, Leipzig, Teubner. 1894. * Frege, G., ''Boole's Logical Calculus and the Concept Script'', 1882, in ''Posthumous Writings'' transl. P. Long and R. White 1969, pp. 9–46. * Gergonne, Joseph Diaz, (1816) ''Essai de dialectique rationelle'', in Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées 7, 1816/7, 189–228. * Jevons, W.S. ''The Principles of Science'', London 1879. * ''Ockham's Theory of Terms'': Part I of the
Summa Logicae The ''Summa Logicae'' ("Sum of Logic") is a textbook on logic by William of Ockham. It was written around 1323. Systematically, it resembles other works of medieval logic, organised under the basic headings of the Aristotelian Predicables, Cat ...
, translated and introduced by Michael J. Loux (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press The University of Notre Dame Press is a university press that is part of the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. The press was founded in 1949, and is the largest Catholic university Catholic higher education i ...
1974). Reprinted: South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 1998. * ''Ockham's Theory of Propositions'': Part II of the Summa Logicae, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman and introduced by Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980). Reprinted: South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 1998. * Peirce, C.S., (1896), "The Regenerated Logic", ''The Monist''
vol. VII
No. 1,
pp. 19
40, The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago, IL, 1896, for the Hegeler Institute. Reprinted (CP 3.425–455). ''Internet Archive'
''The Monist'' 7
*
Sextus Empiricus Sextus Empiricus ( grc-gre, Σέξτος Ἐμπειρικός, ; ) was a Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher and Empiric school physician. His philosophical works are the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman Pyrrhonism, and bec ...
, ''Against the Logicians''. (Adversus Mathematicos VII and VIII). Richard Bett (trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. . * English translation in . ; Secondary Sources * Barwise, Jon, (ed.), ''Handbook of Mathematical Logic'', Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam, North Holland, 1982 . * Beaney, Michael, ''The Frege Reader'', London: Blackwell 1997. * Bochenski, I.M., ''A History of Formal Logic'', Indiana, Notre Dame University Press, 1961. * Boehner, Philotheus, ''Medieval Logic'', Manchester 1950. * Buroker, Jill Vance (transl. and introduction), A. Arnauld, P. Nicole ''Logic or the Art of Thinking'',
Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pre ...
, 1996, . * Church, Alonzo, 1936–8. "A bibliography of symbolic logic". ''Journal of Symbolic Logic 1'': 121–218; ''3'':178–212. * de Jong, Everard (1989), ''
Galileo Galilei Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He wa ...
's "Logical Treatises" and Giacomo Zabarella's "Opera Logica": A Comparison'', PhD dissertation, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America. * Ebbesen, Sten "Early supposition theory (12th–13th Century)" ''Histoire, Épistémologie, Langage'' 3/1: 35–48 (1981). * Farrington, B., ''The Philosophy of
Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
'', Liverpool 1964. * Feferman, Anita B. (1999). "Alfred Tarski". ''
American National Biography The ''American National Biography'' (ANB) is a 24-volume biographical encyclopedia set that contains about 17,400 entries and 20 million words, first published in 1999 by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the American Council of Le ...
''. 21.
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
. pp. 330–332. . * * Gabbay, Dov and John Woods, eds, ''Handbook of the History of Logic'' 2004. 1. Greek, Indian and Arabic logic; 2. Mediaeval and Renaissance logic; 3. The rise of modern logic: from Leibniz to Frege; 4. British logic in the Nineteenth century; 5. Logic from Russell to Church; 6. Sets and extensions in the Twentieth century; 7. Logic and the modalities in the Twentieth century; 8. The many-valued and nonmonotonic turn in logic; 9. Computational Logic; 10. Inductive logic; 11. Logic: A history of its central concepts;
Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...
, . * Geach, P.T. ''Logic Matters'', Blackwell 1972. * Goodman, Lenn Evan (2003). ''Islamic Humanism''. Oxford University Press, . * Goodman, Lenn Evan (1992). ''Avicenna''. Routledge, . * Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. ''The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940''.
Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...
. * Gracia, J.G. and Noone, T.B., ''A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages'', London 2003. * Haaparanta, Leila (ed.) 2009. ''The Development of Modern Logic'' Oxford University Press. * Heath, T.L., 1949. ''Mathematics in Aristotle'', Oxford University Press. * Heath, T.L., 1931, ''A Manual of Greek Mathematics'', Oxford (
Clarendon Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
). * Honderich, Ted (ed.).
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy ''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'' (1995; second edition 2005) is a reference work in philosophy edited by the philosopher Ted Honderich and published by Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of ...
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) . * Kneale, William and Martha, 1962. ''The development of logic''. Oxford University Press, . * Lukasiewicz, ''Aristotle's Syllogistic'', Oxford University Press 1951. * Potter, Michael (2004),
Set Theory and its Philosophy
', Oxford University Press.


External links


The History of Logic from Aristotle to Gödel
with annotated bibliographies on the history of logic * * *
Paul Spade's "Thoughts Words and Things"
An Introduction to Late Mediaeval Logic and Semantic Theory
Open Access pdf download; Insights, Images, Bios, and links for 178 logicians
by David Marans {{bots, deny=Yobot Logic
Logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premise ...