A Brief History of Natural Deduction

Abstract

Natural deduction is the type of logic most familiar to current philosophers, and indeed is all that many modern philosophers know about logic. Yet natural deduction is a fairly recent innovation in logic, dating from Gentzen and Jaśkowski in 1934. This article traces the development of natural deduction from the view that these founders embraced to the widespread acceptance of the method in the 1960s. I focus especially on the different choices made by writers of elementary textbooks—the standard conduits of the method to a generation of philosophers—with an eye to determining what the ‘essential characteristics’ of natural deduction are. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.