© Peter Smith, 2009
About the book
An Introduction to Formal Logic was first published by Cambridge University Press in November 2003. A heavily corrected reprint was published in April 2009. (You can tell them apart by looking at the publication details halfway down the verso of the title page -- or by seeing whether the last paragraph of the Preface thanks people for corrections to the first printing.)
The headline news is that this is an initially very gentle-paced introduction to logic by trees, though it does get as far as a completeness proof for quantificational logic. It is the text book for the compulsory first-year logic course for Cambridge philosophers. Click on the thumbnail of its cover to go to the publisher's page for the book. And from there you can do a Google Book Search which will give you a very good idea of what is in the book, the topics it covers and its approach.
There are additional support materials available:
- Crucially, the answers to the exercises.
- The Worksheets for the Cambridge 1A course.
- Additional draft chapters and various handouts.
There are not only the inevitable typos but also a few quite horrible "thinkos" in the first printing. So, if you are using that version book, please download the corrections sheet. But while that gives a fairly complete list of the typos in the first printing, it does not explain all the little improvements in the second printing. Buy (or get your library to buy) the significantly improved later version.
