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This study therefore treats politics, economics, technology, and geography as fundamental factors in generating an audience for logic - grounding the discipline's abstract principles in a compelling material narrative. The authors explain the turbulent times of the enigmatic Aristotle, the ancient Stoic Chrysippus, the medieval theologian Peter Abelard, and the modern thinkers René Descartes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alan Turing. Examining a variety of mysteries, such as why so many branches of logic (syllogistic, Stoic, inductive, and symbolic) have arisen only in particular places and periods, If A, Then B is the first book to situate the history of logic within the movements of a larger social world.
List of contents
PrefaceIntroduction: What Is Logic?1. The Dawn of Logic2. Aristotle: Greatest of the Greek Logicians3. Aristotle's System: The Logic of Classification4. Chrysippus and the Stoics: A World of Interlocking Structures5. Logic Versus Antilogic: The Laws of Contradiction and Excluded Middle6. Logical Fanatics7. Will the Future Resemble the Past? Inductive Logic and Scientific Method8. Rhetorical Frauds and Sophistical Ploys: Ten Classic Tricks9. Symbolic Logic and the Digital Future10. Faith and the Limits of Logic: The Last Unanswered QuestionAppendix: Further FallaciesNotesBibliographyIndex
About the author
Michael Shenefelt has a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University and began teaching logic after having worked previously as a newspaper reporter. He is also the author of The Questions of Moral Philosophy. Heidi White has a doctorate in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and a master's degree in the history of ideas from the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches philosophy and intellectual history and is a former U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. Both authors teach Great Books at New York University's Liberal Studies Program.
