philosophy of logic: References & Edit History

W.V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (1970), is the best compact introductory exposition. Hilary Putnam, Philosophy of Logic (1971), is useful as a complement to Quine. Much of the important literature, however, is in the form of brief papers rather than monographs. The most successful anthologies of such papers are perhaps L.W. Sumner and John Woods (eds.), Necessary Truth (1969), on logical truth and analyticity; and Leonard Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality (1971), on modal concepts and intensional logic. Raymond Klibansky (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 1 (1968), contains several survey articles thoroughly covering the whole field. Still central are the classical writings of the great modern philosophers of logic: Peter Geach and Max Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, 2nd ed. (1960); Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge (1956); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Eng. trans., 1922) and Philosophical Investigations (Eng. trans., 1953); Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics (1956); and Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (1947). The period 1879–1931 is also covered in a magnificent volume by Jean Van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 (1967), which contains valuable introductions to the different selections and comments on them. Of later literature, especially noteworthy are the writings of Strawson and Quine: P.F. Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971); W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969). Quine’s ideas are discussed critically in Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections (1969). A broad spectrum of new work on the borderline of philosophical logic and linguistics is represented in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (1972). Several problems mentioned above are discussed in Jaakko Hintikka, Logic, Language-Games, and Information (1972); and in J.W. Davis, D.J. Hockney, and W.K. Wilson (eds.), Philosophical Logic (1969). Later monographs include John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology, and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (1981), an examination of the progress of medieval philosophical logic; Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (1982), a book on the interface of philosophy and computer science; and George Bealer, Quality and Concept (1982), an appraisal of elementary symbolic logic.