Abstract

This Philosophical Companion collects sixteen papers organized by theme and sequence to follow the broad outline of a generic course in the logic of first-order quantification. The papers range from 5-34 pages in length and vary widely in degree of technical difficulty. Most of the papers have previously appeared, and only one – the editor’s contribution—was written specifically for the volume. With the publication of this excellent little book, Hughes therefore provides a useful template for the instructor who wants to instill a deeper appreciation of the philosophical side of the discipline in his or her students and fills the gap created when older anthologies such as Copi and Gould’s Readings on Logic or Strawson’s Philosophical Logic went out of print. While similar to each of these classic volumes, the present text is unique in its focus on first order logic; Copi and Gould emphasized topics better suited to an introductory level course while the Strawson text covers topics which are on the one hand slightly more advanced and on the other marked by their historical context