The material conditional — analysis or replacement?

Here’s a couple of chapters, just 22 pages, hot off the laptop, from a bit later in the draft second edition of my Intro to Formal Logic:

Ch 15: The material conditional. Ch 16 More on conditionals

This isn’t the whole of the story about conditionals planned in the book. These chapters will have Exercises, and there will some more about biconditionals there, as well as more illustrations of the oddities of identifying ordinary conditionals with material conditionals. Then a few chapters later we will encounter the very natural standard Natural Deduction rules for the conditional, which (against a classical background) give us the material conditional again — so we’ll have occasion to say more about how the material conditional keeps forcing itself on us. But these two are going to be the core chapters, replacing the current Chs 14 and 15.

Everyone has firm views about conditionals, and so no one is going to agree with these chapters! No doubt, that includes my future self. But I’m at the stage where I want to put the chapters in a e-drawer for a while, and return to them fresher in a few weeks. So in the meantime, I’d love to get comments and suggestions — either by email to ps218 at cam dot ac dot uk, or via the comments form below (though new users may have to wait a day or two to get comments approved). Thanks!