And the other Big Red Logic Books?
I had luxuriant locks, and the temple was still standing, when I originally started the notes on category theory. But here we are … (according to ChatGPT, channelling its inner Rembrandt).
The history of earlier versions is embarrassingly untidy (as I kept changing my mind about such major issues as one book versus two). And then the first edition of Introducing Category Theory was rather rushed out last summer, as I (of course) just didn’t know what the upshot of major open-heart surgery was going to be. It took a while to recover energy for the project, and then I found I wanted to make many more changes than I had expected. So how does the second edition differ? The chapters are ordered rather differently, though some readers are bound to think it still takes far too long to get to (what is now) Part II where the real categorial action starts. Then there are some 45 additional pages, with the new material scattered from beginning to end. I was relieved to find not too many outright errors in the first edition (forgive me for not keeping a tally of those). Hopefully, the new edition too — while unexciting — is mostly full of truths!
I should get a proof copy from Amazon at the beginning of next week. All being well, a paperback will then be out in the world in another week. Not that I think of the current version of the text as set in stone. As I say in the Preface, “you should think of what you are reading as still a ‘beta version’, functional though surely not bug-free”. But I must, for the moment, draw a line under the constant tinkering.
Where next? I have thoughts about one possible short, very short, new book (logical exposition, not philosophy) — but I need to brood on that for a while. But what shall I do in the meantime about the other four Big Red Logic Books?
I can’t imagine revisiting the Gödel books. The world isn’t as interested as I thought it might be in the slim Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. While people do seem to rather like the full-fat version, An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, just as it is. Indeed, there’s not much I’d want to rewrite. And it is already a long book, so actually adding to it could be unwelcome. So I’m minded to leave well alone.
By contrast, there is a lot I’d like to rewrite in An Introduction to Formal Logic. But I suspect that could be wasted effort. OK, the book does steadily sell about a thousand copies a year, and the PDF is downloaded from one to two thousand times a month. But that’s small potatoes compared with the numbers of anglophone students doing intro logic courses out there. Perhaps it would be better to leave IFL as it is, and put any effort in that direction into an overlapping book of a rather different character, one that isn’t aiming to be a sole course text so much as a useful companion to whatever your official intro text happens to be. Something else to brood about, perhaps.
Which leaves the Study Guide, Beginning Mathematical Logic. That is downloaded even more than IFL (and, unlike the intro book, it is unique and without competitors). Improving and updating the Guide for a new edition would in fact be quite an engaging project (OK, I know, I don’t get out much …). It will be both interesting to do some of the homework looking at recently published candidates for inclusion, and also fun to sound off again about pet prejudices …
So that seems to be a decision. Whatever else I get to do, Deo volente, it’s to be a new edition of BML first.
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