November 2025
Beginner
416 pages
8h 6m
English
Content preview from Logic For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 24
Ten Big Names in Logic
IN THIS CHAPTER
Seeing how Aristotle changed it all
Discovering the people who transformed logic
Understanding the evolution of logic
This chapter contains my nominees for the Logic Hall of Fame. I had to pass over lots of great minds so this list wouldn’t be miles long, but these logicians are my top ten.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
Aristotle was the originator of logic. Before him, philosophers (such as Socrates and Plato) and mathematicians (such as Pythagoras and Thales) presented arguments on a wide variety of topics. But Aristotle was the first to examine the structure of argument itself.
In a series of six philosophical writings on logic, later collected as a single work titled Organon, Aristotle identified the foundational concepts in logic. He defined a statement as a sentence that possesses either truth or falsehood (for more information about statements, flip to Chapters 1 and 3). He also studied valid argument structures called syllogisms (see Chapter 2), which contain premises that lead inevitably to a conclusion. For centuries after ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.