What is “Formal Logic”?

Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 13:9-22 (2008)
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Abstract

“Formal logic”, an expression created by Kant to characterize Aristotelian logic, has also been used as a name for modern logic, originated by Boole and Frege, which in many aspects differs radically from traditional logic. We shed light on this paradox by distinguishing in this paper five different meanings of the expression “formal logic”: (1) Formal reasoning according to the Aristotelian dichotomy of form and content, (2) Formal logic as a formal science by opposition to an empirical science, (3) Formal systems in the sense of Hilbert, Curry and the formalist school, (4) Symbolic logic, a science using symbols, such as Venn diagrams, (5) Mathematical logic, a mathematical approach to reasoning. We argue that these five meanings are independent and that the meaning (5) is the one which better characterized modern logic, which should therefore not be called “formal logic”

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Jean-Yves Beziau
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Citations of this work

Speed Up the Conception of Logical Systems with Test-Driven Development.Mathieu Vidal - 2014 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 23 (1):83-103.

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References found in this work

Introduction to metamathematics.Stephen Cole Kleene - 1952 - Groningen: P. Noordhoff N.V..
Introduction to mathematical logic..Alonzo Church - 1944 - Princeton,: Princeton university press: London, H. Milford, Oxford university press. Edited by C. Truesdell.
Formal Logic (1847).Augustus De Morgan - 2018 - Franklin Classics.

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