The Road to Paradox: A Guide to Syntax, Truth and Modality

Truth, provability, necessity, and other concepts are fundamental to many branches of philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Their study has led to some of the most celebrated achievements in logic, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth, and numerous accounts of the paradoxes associated with these concepts. This book provides a clear and direct introduction to the theory of paradoxes and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. It offers new analyses of the ideas of self-reference, circularity, and the semantic paradoxes, and helps readers to see both how paradoxes arise and what their common features are. It will be valuable for students and researchers with a minimal background in logic and will equip them to understand and discuss a wide variety of topics in philosophical logic.

Volker Halbach is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow of New College, Oxford. He is the author of The Logic Manual (2010) and Axiomatic Theories of Truth (Cambridge, 2011).

Graham E. Leigh is Associate Professor of Logic at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has published a number of influential articles on the concepts of truth, reflection, and computation.