Abstract

The "textbook explosion" in recent years in the field of logic has frequently been deplored on the grounds that it has resulted in a proliferation of repetitious and sometimes antiquated material. A sober evaluation of this volume, unfortunately, supports this thesis. Despite the subtitle, the bulk of the material in this book wasn't "modern" two centuries ago. Why should 196 pages of a 355 page text be devoted to such topics as "Logic and Psychology," "Types of Statements in Logical English," "The Syllogism," "Translation into Logical English," and "Informal Fallacies"? Philosophic issues are often obscured by the unmanageable clutter of syllogistic form, squares of opposition, sorites, and other baggage. Moreover, why should an entire appendix be devoted to a "block diagram" of a machine which computes the logical relationship between any two sentences? Especially when it is known that no such machine is possible. There is material of genuine philosophical interest in this book and there is a rather desultory treatment of elementary symbolic logic by means of a confused set of natural deduction rules.—H. P. K.