Elementary Logic: Revised Edition

by Willard Van Orman Quine

Book Overview

Much revised since its first appearance in 1941, Willard Van Orman Quine's Elementary Logic, despite its brevity, is notable for its scope and rigor. It provides a single strand of simple techniques for the central business of modern logic. Basic formal concepts are explained, the paraphrasing of words into symbols is treated at some length, and a testing procedure is given for truth-function logic along with a complete proof procedure for...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674244516
• ISBN13: 9780674244511
• Release Date: October 1980
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Helpful understanding of logic for LSAT prep

As a professional LSAT tutor/blogger in NYC, I believe this book is helpful, but not necessary, for LSAT prep. At 144 pages, it's short and sweet. It's also the first-ever logic textbook (originally published 1941, revised 1980). It discusses many basic issues (necessary/sufficient, etc.) relevant to LSAT logic. If you have the time/inclination, feel free to give it a read, but it's by no means necessary.

The Best Introductory Textbook of Logic

I am surprised to be the first one to write a review about this book. However, I can see how this happened - the author himself writes in his preface to this last edition: "Publisher's samples of fifty-five logic textbooks have accumulated in my office, all introductory and in English. Quantification theory or the first-order predicate calculus is covered in one way or another in most of them. Forty years ago it was covered in none." Forty years ago W. O. Quine published his "Elementary Logic" and set some standards in Logic. I would only want to stress the fact that the good thing about this book is not only that it was the first of this kind, chronologically speaking, but that it still is the first, from a logical point of view (this is the title of another one of Quine's books). Usual readers may not realize that the standards that Quine set forty years ago are still the best that one can find in his attempt to learn Logic. I haven't read a better introductory textbook of Logic and I recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand how the Science of all Sciences (as the medieval philosophers called Logic) works.