Henry Hazlitt strongly recommended this book for all students of the social sciences. It had a formative influence on his life. In fact, it is the book that taught him how to think.And not only Hazlitt. William Stanley Jevons's book was the seminal contribution that education many generations of English and American scholars that crucial discipline of logic. It teaches the rules for thinking. Now, this was a subject that every student once had to take, and not in college but quite early in life, and certainly by high school.No more. Today, it is widely assumed that there is no structure of thinking that is worth studying. And perhaps that explains why serious thinking is so rare. It is nothing short of astonishing that most people go all the way through school with no exposure to logic at all.We've long looked for a good text to bring into print. Jevons, one of the architects of the Marginal Revolution, is a great choice. To be sure, this book is not easy. It takes patience and discipline. It offers a great challenge to anyone. However, if you can go through the book and learn from it, you will have a massive advantage over colleagues, most of whom have never studied this area.Does it make sense that an economics publishers would bring out a book on logic? Certainly it does from a Misesian point of view. Logic is the method of economic thinking. Without it, indeed, economic theory is not possible.May Jevons school the current generation in the way he did so many previous ones.
Author(s): William Stanley Jevons
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 360
Title page......Page 3
Preface......Page 5
Table of Contents......Page 9
I. Definition and Sphere of the Science......Page 13
II. The Three Parts of Logical Doctrine......Page 21
III. Terms and Their Various Kinds......Page 28
IV. Of the Ambiguity of Terms......Page 39
V. Of the Twofold Meaning of Terms......Page 49
VI. The Growth of Language......Page 56
VII. Lebinitz on Knowledge......Page 65
VIII. Kinds of Propositions......Page 72
IX. The Opposition of Propositions......Page 83
X. Conversion of Propositions and Immediate Inference......Page 93
XI. Logical Analysis of Sentences......Page 100
XII. The Predicables, Division, and Definition......Page 110
XIII. Pascal and Descartes on Method......Page 123
XIV. The Laws of Thought......Page 129
XV. The Rules of Syllogism......Page 138
XVI. The Moods and Figures......Page 147
XVII. Reduction of the Imperfect Figures of the Syllogism......Page 156
XVIII. Irregular and Compound Syllogisms......Page 164
XIX. Of Conditional Arguments......Page 172
XX. Logical Fallacies......Page 181
XXI. Material Fallacies......Page 188
XXII. The Quantification of the Predicate......Page 195
XXIII. Boole's System of Logic......Page 203
XXIV. On Method, Analysis and Synthesis......Page 213
XXV. Perfect Induction and the Inductive Syllogism......Page 222
XXVI. Geometrical And Mathematical Induction, Analogy, and Example......Page 230
XXVII. Observation and Experiment......Page 240
XXVIII. Methods of Induction......Page 251
XXIX. Methods of Quantitative Induction......Page 259
XXX. Empirical and Deductive Methods......Page 267
XXXI. Explanation, Tendency, Hypothesis......Page 276
XXXII. Classification and Abstraction......Page 288
XXXIII. Requisites of a Philosophical Language......Page 299
Questions and Exercises......Page 308
Index......Page 344
