Reviews for Explorations in Precalculus Using the TI 83/83 Plus/84 Plus/86

The average rating for Explorations in Precalculus Using the TI 83/83 Plus/84 Plus/86 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-30 00:00:00 Jennie Donivan We used this text for our advanced logic class, and like all logic books there is a good, a bad, and an ugly. First the good. Sider is an awesome writer; every chapter begins with a wonderfully clear exposition of each topic in philosophical logic. I was especially impressed by his chapter on counterfactuals; every student of those strange conditionals should start here rather than with Lewis or Stalnaker (move on to those guys after reading this!). The bad: like most logicians, Sider assumes the notation he is using will be intuitive to the reader--it is not. I doubt I could have grasped the subtleties of his method, which he repeats in every chapter, without the aid of a professor. The ugly: there are some egregious typos, one which comes to mind is on page 61 where he is proving a major rule of inference (he leaves off a negation sign). The great thing about this book is that it covers all the major topics of deductive logic one finds in technical analytic philosophy, and it is helpful to survey if one needs a refresher on whatever one is studying at the moment. While I continue to believe there is no such thing as a good logic text book, I do think Sider's is worth owning as it can be referenced easily whenever one has a question about this or that aspect of first and second order logic.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-29 00:00:00 Cody Hogue Good book covering metalogic for many logics used in philosophy. It begins with propositional and ends with quantified modal logic. In-between, other non-standard and even "devient" logics are covered, as well as tense logic and counterfactual logic. The book is not introductory, but provides a good introduction to many of the logics previously mentioned. The reader can expect to do proofs by mathematical induction as well as prove soundness and completeness for several systems. Philosophical issues are not the focus, so this is not a philosophy of logic book, but Sider does briefly address some of them as they arise. Sider does seem to be a little heavy on the formalism, needlessly so in places, and also does virtually every proof by "reductio" when (a) he could have proved it directly (which is more interesting) and (b) sometimes he doesn't really do reductios but rather proof by contraposition, or simply assuming ¬p and getting p such that p & ¬p form the contradictory pair (which is not, technically, a reductio), yet he calls them "reductios."