The book offers a clear and concise introduction to propositional logic. It can be used in a three-month course, but also could be expanded for use in a longer course. The last two chapters contain philosophical material, which should be accessible even to beginning students.

My aim has been to produce a logic text that offers a concise, ground-up introduction to elementary logic, with an emphasis on the ideas underlying logical principles and rules of inference. I am writing for the student who wants to understand the basic ideas of elementary logic, but may have no intention of doing more advanced work in logic. My concern is to get students to see why a given proof is valid or what the rationale is for a particular rule of inference. Such insights are of more value than being able to zip through proofs in record time. To that end, Chapters 6 and 10 are given up to answering some of the questions at the end of preceding chapters with, quite deliberately, much in the way of authorial intervention.

Since the target audience is philosophy students, I thought it might be useful to look at various meta-logical or philosophical issues that arise from propositional logic, and outline more advanced logics that some students might like to investigate further. It is well for students to know, for example, that the classical logic that underpins elementary logic has counter-intuitive aspects, and that there are rival systems of logic.