Irving Copi


Irving Marmer Copi was an American philosopher, logician, and university textbook author.

Biography

Copi studied under Bertrand Russell while at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he contributed to the calculus of relations with his article using logical matrices.
Copi taught at the University of Illinois, the United States Air Force Academy, Princeton University, and the Georgetown University Logic Institute, before teaching logic at the University of Michigan, 1958–69, and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1969–90.
Assigned to teach logic, Copi reviewed the available textbooks and decided to write his own. His manuscript was split into his Introduction to Logic, and Symbolic Logic. A reviewer noted that it had an "unusually comprehensive chapter on definition" and mentions that "the author accounts for the seductive nature of informal fallacies". The textbooks, now published by Routledge proved popular, and a reviewer of the third edition noted over 100 new exercises added. Both textbooks have been widely used. The most recent edition of Introduction to Logic was published in 2019. Copi is still listed as the primary author and updates are credited to Carl Cohen of the University of Michigan and Victor Rodych of the University of Lethbridge.

Family

In 1941 Copi married Amelia Glaser. They had four children David, Thomas, William, and Margaret.

Books

  • 1953: Introduction to Logic. Macmillan.
  • 1954: Symbolic Logic. Macmillan.
  • 1965:. Language, Thought and Culture. The University of Michigan Press.
  • 1966:. Essays on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Macmillan.
  • 1967:. Contemporary Readings in Logical Theory. Macmillan.
  • 1971: The Theory of Logical Types. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • 1986:. Informal Logic. Macmillan.

    Articles

  • 1948: "Matrix development of the calculus of relations", Journal of Symbolic Logic 13: 193–203
  • 1953: "Analytical Philosophy and Analytical Propositions", Philosophical Studies 4: 87–93.
  • 1954: "Essence and Accident", Journal of Philosophy 51: 706–19.
  • 1956: "Another variant of Natural Deduction", Journal of Symbolic Logic 21: 52–5.
  • 1956: "The Logical Design of an Idealized General-Purpose Computer", Journal of the Franklin Institute 261: 299–314, and 421–36.
  • 1957: "Tractatus 5.542", Analysis 18: 102–4.
  • 1958:. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 5 April 1958; reprinted in Elgot, Calvin C.. Selected Papers. Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
  • 1958: "The Burali-Forti Paradox", Philosophy of Science 25: 281–6.
  • 1963: "Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Critical Exposition of its Main Lines of Thought", Philosophical Review 72: 382.