Some recent changes/additions to the site:
- There was a quiet update of Godel Without (too many) Tears a couple of weeks ago adding a new section, and slightly tinkering with what I say about recursive-but-not-primitive-recursive functions to remove a possible suggestio falsi.
- There has also been an update to a handout on Tennenbaum’s Theorem which adds a section on how not to prove the theorem and tinkers elsewhere.
- The writing of exercises-and-solutions for the Gödel book proceeds at a snail’s pace, but there is a possibly interesting set of exercises on (informal) induction now added.
Next task of this kind: to get back to the Teach Yourself Logic Guide. For a start, I’ve three introductory books on my desk with different virtues, that I’d like to add notes on. In particular, Jan von Plato’s Elements of Logical Reasoning is very recently out with CUP and provides a not-so-familiar route for the logical beginner, and although intended as an introductory book for students has elements that will certainly interest their teachers too. More in due course …
What are the other introductory works you’re looking at?
Goldrei’s intro logic book (recommended to me a number of times), and Smullyan’s Logical Labyrinths.
I used the Smullyan book once (in my never ending search for an appropriate book for intermediate logic; Bostock’s was my latest attempt). It seems to be his First-order Logic book interleaved with relevant puzzles and exercises. The point of those latter is, presumably, to make it more student-friendly. Its virtues are the virtues of the First-order logic book (König’s Lemma is fun to teach, trees are vivid, induction becomes more intuitive, etc.). Defects: Misprints & errors; the extra material is an appliqué rather than really integrated. I experimented by having a couple of the better students read First-Order Logic and they reported that they would have liked that better.
The books look considerably more different than that to me.
Johan Van Benthem’s Logic in Games has appeared (or at least Amazon claims to have some in stock), despite the publication date still being a couple of weeks in the future.
The link to resources/pdfs/tennenbaum_new.pdf doesn’t work.
Corrected –thanks!