Summary:
It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition, and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as well as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1999 described the first edition as "the best starting point for exploring any of the topics in logic." We are confident that the second edition will prove to be just as good. The first edition was the second handbook published for the logic community. It followed the North Holland one volume Handbook of Mathematical Logic, published in 1977, edited by the late Jon Barwise. The four volume Handbook of Philosophical Logic, published from 1983 to 1989, came at a fortunate temporal junction in the evolution of logic. This was the time when logic was gaining ground in computer science and artificial intelligence circles. These areas were under increasing commercial pressure to provide devices that help and/or replace humans in their daily activities. This pressure required the use of logic in the modeling of human activity and organization on one hand and to provide the theoretical basis for computer program constructs on the other.

Authors: Gabbay, Dov M. (Ed.); Guenthner, Franz (Ed.).