A textbook on modal logic, intended for readers already acquainted with the elements of formal logic, containing nearly 500 exercises. Brian F. Chellas provides a systematic introduction to the principal ideas and results in contemporary treatments of modality, including theorems on completeness and decidability. Illustrative chapters focus on deontic logic and conditionality. Modality is a rapidly expanding branch of logic, and familiarity with the subject is now regarded as a necessary part of every philosopher's technical equipment. Chellas here offers an (...) up-to-date and reliable guide essential for the student. (shrink)

This important book provides a new unifying methodology for logic. It replaces the traditional view of logic as manipulating sets of formulas with the notion of structured families of labelled formulas with algebraic structures. This approach has far reaching consequences for the methodology of logics and their semantics, and the book studies the main features of such systems along with their applications. It will interest logicians, computer scientists, philosophers and linguists.