The Logician

There is not only a general consensus about the importance of mathematical logic in the Spanish speaking world, but there is general agreement that Ferrater Mora played an important role in the introduction of this discipline. In the forties he introduced mathematical logic in Chile.

In 1955 Ferrater Mora and Hugues Leblanc, at that time a colleague at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, co-authored Lógica matemática. This book was published in Mexico, but widely distributed throughout the Spanish speaking world . It was reprinted numerous times. In the Prologue to Lógica matemática Ferrater Mora and Leblanc write that, “The purpose of the book is to present in a succinct, clear, and rigorous fashion, the fundamental themes of the discipline that some call modern logic, and that others call symbolic or mathematical logic.” They add that their book “does not follow any particular philosophical direction. It is not necessary. Mathematical logic is not the tool of any one school. In order to use logic, it is not necessary to be either a scientist or a positivist; one can be a tomist, marxist, phenomenologist or existentialist. We are not trying,” they claim, “to expound any philosophical doctrine, but rather to explain the fundamental traits of a science. With this we hope to awaken an interest in the readers of the Spanish language in a discipline that occupies an outstanding place in contemporary knowledge.”

In 1957 Ferrater Mora published Qué es la lógica in Argentina. This small book deals with some of the same themes as Lógica matemática but in a less technical fashion.

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