Equational treatment of first-order logic (Q1344840)

The purpose of this paper ``is to complete a program which was pursued in the 1950's and lead J. Łoś to the idea of ultraproducts but was never properly completed, namely the program of proving some fundamental theorems of first-order logic in an algebraic framework. Several such frameworks were proposed \dots But \dots these developments have bypassed the most natural solution of the problem which will be presented here, namely a complete translation of first-order logic into equational logic''. The author shows that, using Skolem functions, the Gödel-Mal'tsev Completeness Theorem is an immediate consequence of the Boolean Prime Ideal Theorem and of an extension of Birkhoff's Completeness Theorem for equational logic to two-sorted algebras. Considerations on a philosophical level conclude the paper.