John_Stone Report This Comment Date: February 09, 2006 09:03PM
The history of logic is very interesting, and has undergone many phases. In the
Western world, it began about 2500 years ago when the Greeks were developing a
new form of civic structure in which debate and argumentation replaced
allegience to tradition as the major political tools.
Slowly philosophers realized that, if laws were to be based on the outcome of
arguments, an understanding of how valid arguments are actually constructed was
crucial. Formal logic began when thinkers like Aristotle started using simple
diagrams, like the famous Logic Square, to study these structures. This was an
amazing innovation because it involved applying a mixture of algebra and
geometry to the study of language, that is, language in its role as the medium
of argumentation.
During the middle ages, many thinkers dreamed of being able to make a complete
mathematical analysis of logic, a complete formal notation for describing
arguments and their components. The Spanish nobleman Raymond Lull, a famous 11th
century debaucher who latter turned religious, was probably the first to have
this idea, and in that sense he is considered by some as the
great-great-grandfather of computing.
However, the mathematization of logic didn’t really get very far until the
mid-nineteenth century when an Englishmen named George Boole developed the first
fully-fledged formal notation.
The study of logic radically changed at this point. It’s not dissimilar to the
way that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century physicists revolutionized the
study of motion by mathematizing it.
John_Stone Report This Comment Date: February 09, 2006 09:03PM
In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea
Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to
the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio,
guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger
developed an extraordinary visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in
which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like
puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. Indeed, Zellweger
has built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the
educational teaching toys, or “gifts,” of Friedrich Froebel, the great
nineteenth century founder of the Kindergarten movement.
John_Stone Report This Comment Date: February 09, 2006 10:39PM
And recent interview with Shea Zellweger:
[
www.cabinetmagazine.org]
