From the Venerable History of Logic to the Flourishing Future of Logics

Reasoning is one of the most important and distinguished human activities. Logic is commonly described as the science studying the principles and laws governing correct and reliable reasoning. As an intellectual phenomenon, Logic is historically rooted in several civilizations, including ancient China, Greece, and India. As a scientific discipline, formal Logic originated in the seminal works of Aristotle, Chrysippus, and other philosophers from the ancient Greek Megarian and Stoic schools. For over two millennia, Logic was a purely philosophical and rather scholastic discipline—until the mid-19th century, when the groundbreaking works by Boole and De Morgan introduced mathematical methods in the study of Logic and thus laid the foundations of its modern period.

These works, followed by the seminal contributions of Peirce, Frege, Russell, Łukasiewicz, Gödel, Tarski, and many others, gradually transformed the study of Logic into a mathematical discipline, without diminishing its relevance to philosophy. The mathematical study and applications dominated the development of Logic until the mid-20th century, which witnessed the quick expansion of Logic way beyond its philosophical and mathematical scopes and applications, towards a wide range of natural, human, and social sciences. Logical methods also gradually became very popular and useful tools in computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, game theory, etc. That expansion also resulted in a proliferation of a rich variety of non-classical logical systems—rivalling, extending, restricting, or modifying in various ways classical logic. That variety includes modal, epistemic, doxastic, temporal, spatial, deontic, description, non-monotonic, and paraconsistent logics, as well as logics of processes and programs, logics of agency and multi-agent systems, etc. Thus, the solitary study of Logic over many centuries has gradually transformed in recent decades into a rapidly growing multitude of logics, studied, or at least applied, by thousands of scientists with diverse backgrounds and interests. Applying logically correct reasoning and using formal logical methods are of crucial importance in most spheres of the modern society. For instance, their impact in computer science and artificial intelligence is often compared with the impact of calculus on physics and other natural sciences since the 17th century.

The flourishing studies of logics in recent decades have prompted and justified the creation of new, specialized or common purpose, scientific journals in logic and related disciplines. The MDPI journal Logics [1] is the latest such new initiative, which I am happy to announce here. Together with the valuable support of the publisher and of our diverse and highly qualified Editorial Board, we aim to build MDPI Logics into a high-quality, reputable, widely recognized and valued journal, which will manifest both the diversity of logics and unity of Logic. This endeavor, of course, will not succeed without the strong support and quality contributions from the logic research community worldwide, to which this Editorial is addressed. I hereby wish to encourage and welcome submissions of your best research outputs to MDPI Logics!