Welcome to my logic pages!

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All that we are is founded upon our thoughts, and formed on our thoughts." (Dhammapadda, 1.1)

Here are first:

Some reasons why logic is of fundamental human(e) importance
It is at the foundations of all human inferences, and therewith of human survival.
It is at the foundations of peaceful, rational and reasonable social change and all argumentation.
Together with language, logic is what makes human beings really different from other animals: only human beings can seek peaceful agreement on what may be the case and what may be done by rational discussion.
Without mathematical logic, computers are hard to think of, design, built or maintain.

Note that some of the most intelligent men there have been - Socrates, Aristotle, Abélard, Ockham, Newton, Leibniz, Babbage, Boole, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Von Neumann, Smullyan - have spend much of their intellectual efforts at clarifying logical questions, and note also that there is more to logic than mathematics (as you will find when you investigate its history, and non-Western traditions, such as the schools of Buddhist and Hindustic logic).

And as I indicated in the above table, one of the triumphs of modern mathematical logic is the computer - that derives from ideas and ideals of Leibniz, Babbage, Boole, Turing and Von Neumann, and that has radically changed and increased the abilities of man since the second half of the 20th Century.
For the time being this icon means what it supposed to mean: This section  is (still) "Under Construction", and the available versions of papers and essays meanwhile are neither meant to be finished, faultless, nor (necessarily) even meaningful (to all), and are indeed not really intended for "the general public" or else for the most intelligent of these, who care to make some efforts in thinking clearly for themselves.

I wish you pleasurable and instructive reading!

For the present there are just two files on the site from my Ph.D.-thesis-to-be:

Introduction
Chapter 1

First versions of

• Fundamental principles of valid reasoning.
• Fundamental principles of invalid reasoning.
   
• On the question why human beings cannot be computers 
   
• Classical Probability Theory and Learning from Experience.
• The measurement of reality by truth and probability.
   
• On "The Logic of Moral Discourse"
• On The Logical Principles Of Scientific Explanation
   
• W.K. Clifford's "Ethics of Belief" + my Notes
   
• The problem of induction
   
• Part of the Extended Propositional Logic (original in my M.A.-thesis) in the Philosophical Dictionary.
   
• There is now also an improved version of the algebraic semantics for Extended Propositional Logic, and also a probabilistic variant with algebraic semantics. It seems  to me a nice refinement and extension of standard propositional logic: The basic logical operators "not", "and" and "or" have two forms, a weak and strong one, that can be neatly defined in bi-valent logic.

And here is a link to good books about logic.

Maarten Maartensz
                                                                               last update: 02 Aug 2008