Procrastinating with Logicbites …

I’ve just been checking the February figures for downloads from Logic Matters and for sales of the print-on-demand versions of the Big Red Logic Books.

The sales — modest! — of the physical books fluctuate quite a bit. But last month’s best seller was Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. Interestingly, the sales have gone up since I also made that book freely available as a PDF download. Make of that what you will!The most popular download of the three books (and second most popular download overall) was IFL2 , which was downloaded just over a 1000 times. Who knows how it is being received? It is one of the better intro logic books out there, and it certainly beats most of the competition on price! I’ve newly added a page on the front of the PDF version warmly encouraging comments/feedback from readers. We’ll see.But more popular still was Logic: A Study Guide which was downloaded just over 2000 times. This rate is pretty consistent over the months. Lots of people must be being pointing students to it — but I haven’t much idea who is doing the pointing and where and why. But it does mean I need to continue working on the as-yet-unrevised chapters.The third most popular download — and this really is puzzling, though again is pretty consistent — is what used to be the Appendix to the old Teach Yourself Logic Guide, which brings together notes on some seventeen of the Big Books on Mathematical Logic (I haven’t updated this for some time).The next most popular PDF was the second part of the Study Guide (the as-yet-unrevised chapters), closely followed by the Gentle Introduction to categories, downloaded 550 times. As I’ve said before, this really is getting embarrassing; I must take my increasingly stiff and inflexible brain back to the gym and do some category fitness training, so I can revise/finish off that document in a way I don’t feel too ashamed by!So far, the Logicbites I’ve just been recently writing — the introductory chats to chapters of IFL2 — have hardly been downloaded at all. It is very early days, however, and I’ll have to see in due course whether there is much interest. The plan is for three series of IFL Logicbites, one on the propositional logic chapters (not including the chapters on natural deduction), one on quantification theory (again not including ND), and one on natural deduction. I should finish the first series this week. I’ll then pause to decide whether it is worth writing up more.

Actually, I have rather enjoyed doing the (not-very-challenging!) homework involved in writing those early Logicbites, looking at how others have handled various introductory  themes in elementary logic, and thinking a bit too about how things might be improved in a perhaps-to-be-written IFL3. OK, that’s been procrastinating when I should really have been getting back to revising the Logic Guide and the Gentle Introduction. But it is productively structured procrastination.

One sidetrack I’ve been (re)exploring after a long time, also partly prompted by Jonathan Barnes’s Logical Matters, is Aristotle’s logic — I mean the real thing, not the travesty that you get in logic books like Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic (which of course nowhere discusses what Aristotle cared about, the systematization of his meta logical investigations). It would be good to weave a few such Aristotelian threads into IFL3.

The post Procrastinating with Logicbites … appeared first on Logic Matters.