Goodbye Descartes: End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind - Softcover

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KEITH DEVLIN, Ph.D., is a mathematician and the Dean of the School of Science of St. Mary's College. He is also the Senior Researcher at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Communication. He is the author of Life by the Numbers (Wiley), Mathematics: The New Golden Age, and Mathematics: The Science of Patterns.

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"[Goodbye, Descartes] is certain to attract attention and controversy . . . a fascinating journey to the edges of logical thinking and beyond." Publishers Weekly(P).

"A masterly survey of Aristotelian and Stoic logic, of George Boole's 19th-century "algebra of thought," [and] of the contemporary project to produce a talking computer." Wall Street Journal.

"Superb historical analysis of how 'mind' and natural language came to be understood as products of a logic machine. . . . This is frontier science, conveyed by a practitioner who cares about and knows how to enliven the relevant history." Wilson Quarterly.

What are the laws of thought that allow human beings to reason and communicate so effectively? Can rules of thought and language be written down and programmed into computers that will one day think and communicate as well as we do?

In a lively and stimulating narrative, acclaimed author Keith Devlin chronicles scientists' centuries-old quest to discover the laws of thought, from the astonishingly adept efforts of the ancient Greeks, to the invention of the first primitive "thinking machine" in the late nineteenth century, to radical findings that are challenging the very notion that the mind follows logical rules.

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