The formal structure of valid inference — deduction, predicate and modal logic, and the fallacies and paradoxes testing them.
10 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Elementary Lessons in Logic
W. Stanley Jevons · 1870
A worked introduction to both deductive and inductive reasoning for readers with no background, built around graduated exercises rather than theory…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Prior Analytics
Aristotle · 350 BCE
Introduces the syllogism, cataloguing the argument-forms that guarantee a true conclusion from true premises and founding formal deductive logic.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Elements of Logic
Richard Whately · 1826
A systematic logic textbook whose treatment of fallacies of ambiguity, begging the question and irrelevant conclusion became the standard…
+7 more at this level
12 of 18 works
W. Stanley Jevons
A worked introduction to both deductive and inductive reasoning for readers with no background, built around graduated exercises rather than theory taught for its own sake.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lewis Carroll
Teaches syllogistic deduction as a board game played with counters on a diagram, arguing valid inference is a mechanical procedure anyone can learn to perform correctly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lewis Carroll
A regress argument: accepting a valid inference's premises never logically forces accepting its conclusion, because the license to draw the inference can always be demanded as a further premise.
3 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Lewis Carroll
Works through propositional inference using diagrams and puzzles, treating logic as a game of elimination rather than a set of rules to memorise.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Graham Priest, Koji Tanaka & Zach Weber
Surveys logics in which a contradiction no longer entails every proposition, arguing that inconsistency and outright logical explosion are two different things that classical logic wrongly identifies.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Surveys what makes something an argument at all and how the deductive, dialectical and rhetorical models of argument quality pull apart once real disagreement is at stake.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Aristotle
Introduces the syllogism, cataloguing the argument-forms that guarantee a true conclusion from true premises and founding formal deductive logic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyGeorge Boole
Represents logical propositions as algebraic equations obeying their own consistent rules, founding symbolic and propositional logic as a branch of mathematics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRobert H. Thouless
Names and classifies the dishonest argumentative tricks that persuade without being valid, arguing that most bad reasoning survives because its flaws have no familiar name to catch it by.
Alfred Tarski
Sets out quantification theory and the axiomatic method as the shared foundation beneath every deductive science, from arithmetic to geometry.
Richard Whately
A systematic logic textbook whose treatment of fallacies of ambiguity, begging the question and irrelevant conclusion became the standard classification used in English-language logic teaching for a century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Stuart Mill
Sets out canonical methods — agreement, difference, concomitant variation — for inferring causal laws from observed regularities, treating induction rather than deduction as the root of empirical knowledge.
about 27 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026