Graham Priest shows that formal logic is a powerful, exciting part of modern philosophy -- a tool for thinking about everything from the existence of God and the reality of time to paradoxes of probability. Explaining formal logic in simple, non-technical terms, this edition includes new sections on mathematical algorithms, axioms, and proofs.

Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center , as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne (where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy). His books include Doubt Truth to be a Liar (OUP, 2008), One (OUP, 2014), and Towards Non-Being (2nd ed. OUP, 2016).

• Preface to Second Edition


• Preface to First Edition


• 1: Validity: what follows from what?


• 2: Truth funtions - or not?


• 3: Names and quantifiers: is nothing something?


• 4: Descriptions and existence: did the Greeks worship Zeus?


• 5: Self-reference: What is this chapter about?


• 6: Necessity and possibility: what will be must be?


• 7: Conditionals: what's in an if?


• 8: The future and the past: is time real?


• 9: Identity and change: is anything ever the same?


• 10: Vagueness: how do you stop sliding down a slippery slope?


• 11: Probability: the strange case of the missing reference class


• 12: Inverse probability: you can't be indifferent about it!


• 13: Decision theory: great expectations


• 14: Halt! What goes there?


• 15: Maybe it is true - but you can't prove it!


• A little history and some further reading


• Glossary


• Problems


• Problem solutions


• Bibliography


• General index