I thought this book was dreadful, and it is one of the few books I’ve tossed in the recycling bin after reading.

In the 90’s, I went through notepads and erasers grinding through the work required to earn my philosophy degree’s required symbolic logic credit. I took simple proofs to dead-end after dead-end. I remember silently scratching away at sheet after sheet of green engineering paper that had been gifted to me by my roommate Justin on many late nights trying to get those damnable proofs to work out. Every failure or wadded-up paper was an opportunity; it was a chance to start over and see the problem differently. It was laborious, but I felt better after every surmounted obstacle.

Every textbook section or class would introduce a new spell: DeMorgan’s Theorems, modus ponens, modus tollens, “existential instantiation,” etc. and then throw terse, dense premises at us that we must transform to a conclusion. It’s in this class, under the guidance of my then-TA, Tracy Lupher, that I learned debugging in its most essential form. I eventually earned an A in the class, acing the final. My 5^th edition of Irving M. Copi’s “Symbolic Logic” will travel with me as long as I have a pulse as a testament to that challenge.

As such, I take logic pretty seriously. Decades on now, I still love the topic and, sadly, have gotten a bit rusty. While visiting Foyle’s in Charing Cross last year, I saw The Art of Logic and thought a refresher from a “lay” book would be nice. As a writer of curriculum, I’m always keen to see how others take the difficult palatable as well, so I thought the book might serve in both of those capacities.

Sadly, my high expectations for this book were not realized. Instead, it:

• Failed to provide substantial footing as an introduction to logic
• Lost its way both by structure and poor editing
• And had an odd fixation with using distracting and contentious social-justice scenarios for demonstrating the poorly-introduced logical concepts — and I’m a liberal!

In total, my dislike for this book was so great I had to write a lengthy post about it. I’ve included notes about the few bright spots as well.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I bought a copy of Reed & Kellogg’s Graded Lessons in English: a grammar book in the Euclidean pedagogical tradition dating from the late 19^th. Having read it, I really enjoyed it and extracted notes from it; since the material builds axiomatically, proposition by proposition, it’s very easy to extract notes for.

I think there are two good reasons for a modern person to read the book.

1. It is a clear, reasoned, adult-ready book of grammar of the English language. I’m not sure it’s the best way to learn English, but as a summary, or a review, or a coalescing document, it’s lucid and enjoyable.
2. It introduces the abstraction of the sentence diagram as a learning aid. I think this is worth seeing in the primary source for two audiences:
   1. Those who create learning materials: How the learning aid and knowledge organizing tool is introduced (the diagram) never loses sight of the fact that it is in service to the material, it is not an end in itself. That’s worth remembering!
   2. Those who need tools for studying other grammar (linguists, foreign language learners, etc.) Knowing the grammatical terms and their notation in English sets one up for porting a diagramming frameowrk to other languages under study

Find my notes after the jump

As I mentioned in my piece about the textbook of schoolgirl Maud Fenstermaker, I am fascinated by the old-style of pedagogy from the late 19^th century which continues to use the axiomatic listing styles of Euclid’s Elements.

While it might not be surprising that a book on English Grammar or Latin Grammar or Geometry would retain this structure, even a book on penmanship used this format. I recently borrowed “Spencerian Handwriting: The Complete Collection of Theory and Practical Workbooks for Perfect Cursive and Hand Lettering” by Platt Rogers Spencer” from the NYPL and, to my great surprise, this is also written in an axiomatic style.

More after the jump