Symbolic Logic: An Accessible Introduction to Serious Mathematical Logic, Volume 1

There is a gap between what many students learn in their first course in formal logic, and what they are expected to know for their second. Symbolic Logic: An Accessible Introduction to Serious Mathematical Logic closes that gap—making topics from both courses accessible even to students with little or no technical background. The text divides naturally into two volumes, the first for reasoning in logic, and the second for reasoning about it. The first volume introduces classical symbolic logic as appropriate for beginning students. The second builds to Gödel’s completness and incompleteness results. A distinctive feature of the last part is a complete development of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.

This first volume includes Parts I and II of the text. Part I introduces the complete classical predicate calculus with equality, including development of both an axiomatic and a natural derivation system. Part II transitions to methods for reasoning about logic—where these methods are important, not only for results, but as part of the broader “toolkit” that comes with
mathematical logic.

Tony Roy is professor emeritus at California State University San Bernardino. He was a longtime member of the Philosophy Department, including as professor and department chair. His research and publications are in logic and metaphysics. Symbolic Logic is the product of many years, and of having offered somewhere over a hundred course sections covering different parts of its content.