[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[curt]

Jackhat1 at aol.com wrote:
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> Is Copi's the best intro to logic book? What are some other good logic  books?
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A few tangential suggestions: Richard Popkin's masterful "The History Of 
Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle", offers very little in terms of an 
introduction to logic, per se, but it does something that is also 
important - it explains the genealogy of scepticism in modern thought. 
In doing so, Popkin over and and over again comes back to one of the 
foundational arguments of scepticism: you can prove anything you like 
with logic.

A modern summary of classical sceptical arguments, including 
demonstrations of the unreliability of logic, is found in two books by 
Julia Annas: "Modes of Scepticism" and "Outlines of Scepticism" - both 
of which are directly based on the works of Sextus Empiricus. Of course, 
most demonstrations of the unreliability of logic directly depend on 
logic themselves!

Logic as we know it starts with Aristotle - and the little book 
"Aristotle the Philosopher" by J.L. Ackrill is a great introduction to 
logic in it's proper historical and philosophical context. Ackrill also 
has a more technical book on Aristotle's logic ("Categories and De 
Interpretatione") - but I haven't read that yet. W.D. Ross' book on 
Aristotle's "Prior and Posterior Analytics" is probably also excellent 
but I haven't gotten to that one, either.

I think it's worth emphasizing that "logic" is merely an attempt to 
articulate the "rules" that we use when we reason well. As such "logic" 
tends to merely describes reasoning as if it were an automated process 
that could be carried out by a machine - which it is not.

- Curt