Towards the Logic of General Names

1.1. The preceding chapter tells of programmes of reforming logic, all of them being concerned with what we now call traditional logic. By the end of the 19th century there appears a new kind of logic. It was so new that people needed to call it by a new name. The term logistic dated from the International Congress of Philosophy of 1904, where it was suggested independently by Itelson, Lalande, and Couturat. Louis Couturat, the renowned discoverer of Leibniz’s logic, might have followed Leibniz who employed either the name calculus ratiocinator, or logica mathematica, or else logistica for his logical systems. That expression, after a fairly wide reception in the thirties, later went out of use. The designation mathematical logic, also following Leibniz, proved more lasting but nowadays it denotes only a part of what was originally meant, viz., the logical study of mathematical systems, being distinguished from the logical study of philosophical systems; at present, the latter happens to be called philosophical logic. Many authors and institutions prefer the term symbolic logic as sufficiently general and rendering the concern with the symbolic aspect of proof procedures, while in some historical contexts, it is the expression modern logic which proves more convenient. As far as the difference between the old and the modern logic is concerned, the opinions of historians and philosophers of logic may vary from stressing their radical incompatibility to the claim that traditional logic forms just a tiny part of the modern version.