Vern Poythress’s
Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought is a hefty book. If you cut
out the bibliography and the indices, it still clocks in at 708 pages. As such,
it’s hard to review it all in one go. I’m going to try though by listing the
things I particularly liked about this book and the areas in which I felt it
fell short.
Pros
- This book gives a breathtaking picture of the breadth of
Logic in ways that other Introductory texts that I have read do not.
- It is written from a theologically Reformed,
presuppositional perspective (might not be a pro for everyone)
- The author works hard to unify all the different types of
Logic (i.e. categorical logic, propositional logic, Boolean algebra, predicate
logic, set theory, modal logic, etc.) and to show how they all fit together and
support one another.
- The author clearly loves his material. His excitement seeps
through the pages.
- The author continually attempts to show how logic relates
to other fields of study such as philosophy, physics, computer programming,
theology, and science.
Cons
- Even though it has over 700 pages, the book moves along at
a very fast pace. Sometimes the concepts are zooming by so quickly that you
might miss something because it didn’t seem significant at the time only to
realize a few chapters later that the earlier concept is being used to build
even more theoretical structures later on in the book. This means that there
was a lot of going back and reading earlier parts of the book for me in order
to follow his arguments.
- There are very few exercises for a student or reader to
work through. Even thought this book was purportedly written as an introductory
logic text, it doesn’t seem to have been designed with the student in mind.
- Some of the author’s theological explanations become
repetitive over the course of the book. There are only so many ways to restate
the relationship of logic concepts to the problem of the many and the one or to
ideas of transcendence and immanence.
- Syllogisms are really shortchanged in this book. I guess
if I want more syllogisms I need to get my hands on Peter Kreeft’s Socratic
Logic next.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this for students just
starting out with Logic. If this is your first encounter with Logic, I imagine
it might be overwhelming. If you already have a grasp of basic Aristotelian
Logic and you want to expand your idea of what Logic is and what it can do,
this would be a good book to read through.
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