What I am reading: Propositional and Predicate Calculus

I am reading the book Propositional and Predicate Calculus by Derek Goldrei.

I am a person who loves to shave the yak. And not only do I love to shave the yak, I love to shave yaks in order to shave yaks. I like going all the way to the bottom.

If you suffer from this tendency as I do, you are continually asking... but why? Why does this work that way? How do we know that? What makes us sure? And if you do that enough, regardless of where you started, you are inevitably going to get down to logic and formal language... or at least that has been my experience at any rate.

So here I am... reading a book on propositional and predicate calculus. I am not even going to try to justify how I got here beyond what I've already said about yak shaving. I can't remember if it was an interest in compilers, or math, or something else... but yaks were shaved, and now we are learning about formal logic!

But this subject is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, so I want to read this book slowly, and I want to try and internalize as much as possible of it. So the way I am going to do that is by writing up a bit about each of the sections I am reading.

Each of these posts is just going to be a short little post about that section, giving an overview of what was covered and my reaction to it. This helps me internalize what I am learning and go a bit deeper.

These posts really are just for my own benefit, writing them here and publishing them helps me understand more deeply.

My hope is that after reading this book, or maybe just after reading a chapter or two, I can write a post that is more approachable or has some value to someone other than me.