Logic: A Graphic Introduction

This book, part of The Guardian's series of free little graphic introductions to complex ideas or isms (this one by Dan Cryan, Sharron Shatil and Bill Mayblin), was surprisingly good. I salvaged it from the room of my brother who recently moved out and read it because I had nothing better to do and it's quite short and logic is quite a fascinating thing really. As a philosophy student, logic is something that I'm not unfamiliar with, but it's still an alien field that I could likely explore for months without being able to provide much insight beyond mere understanding - this is a field of study only meaningfully advanced once or twice a century by the keenest dedicated minds. The book, written in laymans' English replete with vaguely amusing illustrations demonstrating points, ideas and thinkers, gives an excellent introductory overview of logic: its roots in argumental structures, moving onto its relations to algebraic thought, the foundations of mathematics, ways of thinking about science and computing, how it deals with problems such as paradoxes and proofs, and how concepts such as truth and possibility fit in. In terms of critical content there wasn't much to grapple with here (hence why this post is only one paragraph), but it did make me zone out a few times in sheer overwhelmed wonder as to how some of the deeper "discoveries" could have been made - in logic there is nothing to observe, test for, experiment on or respond to, just pure thought structures analysed in abstraction to see how watertight they are; which doesn't sound like an easy task. Still, thinking about thinking and how similar it is to arithmetic or code or electronic systems or whatever, is quite interesting. As far as graphic introductory overviews go, this is pretty good, but for people genuinely interested in logic, there are sure to be easily accessible books out there that are way better at providing an academic entry to understanding.