"Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health; and you may get much healthy enjoyment, no doubt, from Games, such as Back-gammon, Chess, and the new Game “Halma”. But, after all, when you have made yourself a first-rate player at any one of these Games, you have nothing real to show for it, as a result! You enjoyed the Game, and the victory, no doubt, at the time: but you have no result that you can treasure up and get real good out of. And, all the while, you have been leaving unexplored a perfect mine of wealth. Once master the machinery of Symbolic Logic, and you have a mental occupation always at hand, of absorbing interest, and one that will be of real use to you in any subject you may take up. It will give you clearness of thought——the ability to see your way through a puzzle——the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form——and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art. Try it. That is all I ask of you!"
The joy the author takes on conceptualization and mental operations, logic and computation; the willful use of the Imagination to explore and deepen understanding - there's irreverence, "just for fun", like a child working with the most fascinating toy of all - the mind - and at the same time, a respect and reverence to the profound insights, fruits of the work of play.
I've seen a few well reviewed Symbolic logic books but not sure if that fits the criteria. Mostly digging into boolean algebra atm.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Science-T-Jaynes/d...
- Greg Restall - Logic (and he also gives some recommendations of his own that are worth checking out). If you use this, check the errata in Restall's website.
- Richard Jeffrey - Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits (Smith has a textbook that is modelled largely after this, but Jeffrey's book is more to the point and fun to follow along)
- Daniel Velleman - How to Prove It, which has tons of good exercises for practicing symbolig logic in the context of the construction of proofs, and introduces some mathematics along the way.
Having read half a book on logic and subsequently learned basic set theory has already helped read the first portion of the probability book. But then I also got really into formal logic, I found it really fascinating as a programmer and I think every person should learn it (with plenty of applications to regular life), so I decided to take a deep dive into it. The venn diagrams visualizations are what helped me the most.
I think one of things that held me back initially was my background as a programmer, it made reading the logic set notation challenging, ie the plus signs meaning disjunctions and primes negation conjunctions.
Does anyone know if this graphical reasoning system something Lewis Carroll invented himself?
It looks like he also wrote a sequel book, about how to turn the system into a game: https://archive.org/details/gameoflogic00carruoft/page/28/mo...
Unfortunately it hasn't been digitised as well as OP
They don't have Symbolic Logic, though.
