The Development of Logic

A large history of logic from its Greek beginnings to the twentieth century. William and Martha Kneale begin with the forerunners of logic in Greek argument and with Aristotle's syllogistic and modal logic, then give unusually full attention to the Megarian and Stoic logicians and their propositional logic. They go on to logic in the Roman and medieval periods, including the medieval theories of supposition and consequences, then to Leibniz, and to the nineteenth-century algebra of logic of Boole and others. The longest part of the book covers the transformation of logic by Frege and his successors: the foundations of arithmetic, the paradoxes and set theory, Russell, formalism and intuitionism, and the metamathematical results of the 1930s, including Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The treatment is technical and assumes some familiarity with modern logic.

It remains the standard single-volume history of Western logic, and it shows how old many supposedly modern ideas are.