ABSTRACT
The first intellectual operation at which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and fmding in what part the fallacy lay. (Mill, Autobiography, ch. l,para.12)
It is now one hundred and fifty years since the publication of Mill's monumental work, A System o/Logic (1843). From that time until ten years ago it had gone from being the most widely studied book on logic to being not only out of print, but unavailable in many university libraries. The revolution in formal logic which began with De Morgan, Boole and Jevons, and culminated in Frege, and Russell and Whitehead, has placed Mill's work much further afar conceptually than it is temporally. Still, it richly repays study - not only for philosophers of science but also for those who are interested in the history of logic. Since informal logic, as a discipline, is still in its infancy compared, say, to formal logic
and epistemology, just what its boundaries are and proper subject matter is have not yet been fmnly settled. Certain issues, nevertheless, which have proven of perennial interest to informal logicians and argumentation theorists are also of central concern to Mill in the Logic. I shall limit myself to discussing only some of these. A complete review of Mill's importance to the history of informal logic would take us beyond the limits of a chapter-length study.
