The Open Logic Project

Tired of having to use an advanced logic text that isn’t quite right for your class?  Do you want to change the terminology, change the order in which material is covered, pick-and-choose what’s included, or add your own stuff directly to the text instead of distribute handouts?  And, in particular, would you like your text to be available for free?

That’s what the Open Logic Project is about: providing customizable building blocks for an advanced logic text.  We’re interested mainly in the kind of course aimed at advanced undergraduate/graduate students in philosophy.  (Why? There are good, standard texts in mathematical logic and logic for computer science, lots of material of interest to philosophers isn’t covered in standard logic texts, and philosophy students prefer a more verbose style of exposition and less mathematical examples.)

The current status of the text is “pre alpha” — it’s more a proof of concept than a finished product.  But it has been used already in Calgary’s Logic II course, which covers basics of set theory, soundness and completeness, Turing machines, and undecidability of first-order logic.

In addition to a modular mix-and-match approach, we’re planning some other features, like configurable nomenclature (change whether you want to call them “interpretations,” “structures,” or “models,” for instance, without search-and-replace), assistance with formatting the final PDF, etc.

All of this is not only open (free to use), but open source: you can download the source code, modify it to your liking, and if you like, contribute to the project. To find out more, start at the About page.  You can look at PDFs at builds.openlogicproject.org, and find the source code on GitHub.