If A, Then B: How Logic Shaped the World

Description

Table of Contents; Preface; Introduction: What Is Logic? ; The Strange Nature of Logical Validity ; What Makes a Valid Argument Valid? ; The Divine-Command Theory of Logic ; Logic as Culturally Invariant ; Logic as Timeless and Placeless; The Social History of Logic; 1. The Dawn of Logic; The Effect of Geography on the Flow of Ideas; The Effect of the Sea Trade; Transportation and Civilization ; Classical Greece as the Extreme Case; The Athenian Assembly ; 2. Aristotle: Greatest of the Greek Logicians; The Study of Argument in India ; The Singularity of Aristotle.;While logical principles seem timeless, placeless, and eternal, their discovery is a story of personal accidents, political tragedies, and broad social change. If A, Then B begins with logic's emergence twenty-three centuries ago and tracks its expansion as a discipline ever since. It explores where our sense of logic comes from and what it really is a sense of. It also explains what drove human beings to start studying logic in the first place. Logic is more than the work of logicians alone. Its discoveries have survived only because logicians have also been able to find a willing audience, an.