Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T02:48:44.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

W. D. Hart
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Get access

Summary

Preface

In high school I read a book from the school library called Introduction to Mathematical Thought by E. R. Stabler. Early on he described a pattern in which he displayed a conditional, its antecedent, and its consequent. I stared at this display, trying to get the point. Then the penny dropped: this is a way the mind moves, from the first two to the third. That was my first experience of explicit logic, and it was eye-opening.

I took my first logic course at university from W. V. Quine. He lectured by mumbling at his stack of three-by-five cards, but the textbook was the second edition of his Methods of Logic, which I still think is the best baby logic book I have seen. As I learned gradually who Quine was, I was too awestruck to approach him again. Instead, I did a lot of work with his former student Burt Dreben. Dreben described himself as a logical positivist, but he was really a philosophical nihilist. He once said in lecture, “Rubbish is rubbish, but the history of rubbish is scholarship.” The rubbish was all of philosophy, and the scholarship was where he wanted me directed. He taught us a lot of logic and early analytic philosophy. He first taught me Gödel’s incompleteness theorem from Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language, and he later taught it from Gödel’s original paper. Both now seem to me perverse pedagogy, especially the first, but it reflected his historical taste.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Preface
  • W. D. Hart, University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Book: The Evolution of Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779589.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Preface
  • W. D. Hart, University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Book: The Evolution of Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779589.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • W. D. Hart, University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Book: The Evolution of Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779589.001
Available formats
×