Symbolic Logic

During the 1880s and 1890s, when Lewis Carroll (The Rev. G. L. Dodgson) was completing his last stories for children — Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded — he was also composing one of the most brilliantly eccentric logic textbooks ever written: a work in three parts, or volumes, titled simply Symbolic Logic. Part I, published in 1896, is still read by most students of logic, and is widely quoted in modern logic textbooks. But Part II, on which Carroll was working when he died in January 1898, vanished without trace some seventy-six years ago. Many logicians have doubted that it ever existed, or have supposed either that Carroll never got to it or that, if he did get to it, he did not get far. I have during the past eighteen years been able to locate the missing manuscript and galley proofs for Part II. Although not complete, it is longer and more important than Part I. In the pages that follow this material is published for the first time, together with a new, fifth edition of Part I. William Warren Bartley, III