Philosophical and mathematical logic (Q1622790)

The pages of this textbook are written by a dedicated professor of logic with many years of teaching experience. This fact guarantees that such a book must be something special. And really, the book is approachable and self-contained, although it covers all significant topics of modern logic. Each chapter, made as an interplay between logic, philosophy, mathematics, language and theoretical computer science, is imbued with instructive examples and problems, followed by the corresponding solutions and useful references. Starting with propositional, predicate and modal logics, finite and infinite sets, arithmetics and incompleteness, philosophy of language, intuitionism, applications of logic, and fallacies, with the aim to develop all these topics later, the author presents the `first impressions' on a descriptive and informal level, with useful historical remarks. The second chapter deals with semantics and syntax of propositional logic, including decidability, deducibility, natural deductions and tableaux, paradoxes, soundness and completeness. The chapter devoted to sets begins with Russell's paradox, and continues with relations, functions, orderings, denumerable and non-enumerable sets. Introducing the first-order predicate language is followed by basics on truth definition, validity, logical consequence, provability, completeness, compactness, and the relationships of logic with philosophy of science and artificial intelligence. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are accompanied by discussion on non-standard models of Peano arithmetic. The chapter on modal logic covers a variety of modal logic systems, possible worlds semantics, tableaux methods, soundness and completeness theorems, strict implication, counterfactuals and elements of relevant logics. Chapter 7 is the only one that is a coauthored work, by L. Bergmans, J. Burgess, A. D. Gupta and H. de Swart, and presents, roughly speaking, an introduction to the philosophy of language. Basic ideas of intuitionism are presented together with properties of intuitionistic propositional calculus, syntax, semantics, tableaux, completeness, but also some aspects of quantifiers and sets in intuitionism are discussed as well. The two final chapters dealing with applications (programming in logic, relational databases, and social choice theory), and fallacies and unfair discussion methods, seem extremely interesting. The book can be recommended not only to students and teachers of mathematic and philosophy, but also to a wider circle of readers interested in all aspects of applications of modern symbolic logic in linguistic, computer science, and philosophy and methodology of science. The author's style and choice of topics add to the real pleasure while reading this book.