Pure Logic or the Logic of Quality apart from Quantity: with remarks on Boole's System and on the Relation of Logic and Mathematics.

Notes

First edition of Jevons's first work on logic, one of two pamphlets (the other was The Substitution of Similars, 1869) in which he developed the calculus presented by Boole in An investigation of the laws of thought (1854). Jevons had already consulted Boole before sending him a copy; in a letter of 1863 he recorded,"I have written on the subject to Professor Boole, on whose logical system mine is an improvement. In his answer he does not explain away an objection I had raised against his system. He seems to think that my paper viz. Pure Logic probably does not contain more than he himself knows, this being a common failing of philosophers and others; but still he tells me very civilly that if I think still that there is anything new in my paper I ought to publish, which of course I shall do one way or another before long." Jevons's principal advance was to reduce the operations of the Boolean calculus to a mechanical procedure. He here stood at the start of a road that led to the modern application of logic in computer-programming; he himself designed a "logical abacus" and "logical piano", ancestors of the computer which performed the operations of the revised Boolean calculus and whose mode of operation had affinities with the use of a truth-table.