Acknowledgements

Benjamin Martin, Book Editor

This open-access textbook was only made possible by the passion and generosity of series editor Christina Hendricks. In bringing together researchers from across the world, and diverse areas of philosophy, to produce an excellent freely accessible resource for students, she has done the profession and subject of philosophy a great service. My strongest thanks must go also to Apurva Ashok, our project manager for the series at the Rebus Foundation. Her resourcefulness, and guidance in approaching the novel world (for many of us) of online open-access textbooks was indispensable.

In transferring the textbook to its digital formats we came across several hurdles, all of which could have not have been solved so quickly and elegantly had it not been for the suggestions and expertise of the wider Rebus Community. My warmest thanks go to all those who helped. Further, the finished textbook would not be in the polished form it is without the help of our copyeditor Colleen Cressman, and Heather Salazar and Jonathan Lashley, who provided the artwork and design of the book cover, respectively.

Lastly, but certainly not least, I would like to thank each of the contributors and reviewers. All gave up their free time to deliver what is an excellent introductory textbook, making my job as editor incredibly simple.

Christina Hendricks, Series Editor

I would like to thank the authors in this book for being willing to contribute their expertise to this project on a volunteer basis. This book, and the rest of the books in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series would not have gotten anywhere if there were not enough people willing and able to take the significant time and effort required to create a book like this.

Special thanks to the Logic book editor Benjamin Martin, who created an outline of chapters, selected authors and peer reviewers, and did an excellent job editing the chapters all the way through. I also want to thank him and the authors for their patience; this was one of the first books conceived for the series, and we were developing along the way just how to go about getting these books created and published. Because of that, and because I am working on the series on a volunteer basis off the side of my desk as well, the process may have taken much longer than many thought it would.

Also instrumental to the success of this book are the peer reviewers, Berta Grimau and Daniel Massey. They volunteered their time and expertise to read through a draft of the whole book and provide constructive comments and suggestions. The book is better as a result!

I had to learn quite a few new things in order to make this book as accessible as possible, including how to write logical symbols in LaTeX—thank you to my partner for getting me started on that. Thank you to Peter Krautzberger, who jumped into the discussion forum to help with some questions I had about LaTeX and MathJax. And Ryan Randall, on the scholar.social Mastodon instance, helped me learn how to put horizontal lines between premises and conclusions in arguments in standard form using CSS.

Jonathan Lashley has done an amazing job with the design of the book covers for this series, using original artwork by Heather Salazar (who is the editor for the Philosophy of Mind book in this series). The book covers are exceptionally well done, and really bring the series together as a whole.

Colleen Cressman has provided much-needed help with copyediting. I am very grateful for her thorough and detailed efforts, and for the suggestions she made to help make the chapters clearer and more accessible for introductory-level students.

When I started this project there were many discussions amongst philosophers from various parts of the world on the Rebus Community platform, and their ideas and suggestions contributed significantly to the final products. There were also numerous people who gave comments on draft chapter outlines for each book. Thank you to the many unnamed philosophers who have contributed to the book in these and other ways!

This book series would not have gotten beyond the idea stage were it not for the support of the Rebus Community. I want to thank Hugh McGuire for believing in the project enough to support what we both realized at the time was probably much bigger than even our apprehensions about its enormity. Zoe Wake Hyde was instrumental in getting the project started, particularly in helping us develop workflows and documentation. And I’m not sure I can ever thank Apurva Ashok enough for being an unfailingly enthusiastic and patient supporter and guide for more months than I care to count. She spent a good deal of time working with me and the book editors to figure out how to make a project like this work on a day-to-day level, and taught me a great deal about the open publishing process. Apurva kept me on track when I would sometimes drop the ball or get behind on this off-the-side-of-my-desk project. She is one of the best collaborative partners I have never (yet!) met in person.

Finally, I want to thank my family for understanding how important this work is and why I have chosen to stay up late so many nights to do it. And for their patience on the many groggy, pre-coffee mornings that followed.