When they were finally unearthed, the Stoics were again treated with contempt. The German Kantian Carl Prandtl in his famous History of Ancient Logic (1855) described the truth table for "If .. then ..." as "excessively stupid". Finally, in 1896, the great American logician and eccentric, Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914) discovered the truth tables in a Stoic fragment. Casting off the dust of two millenia, the genius of the Stoics returned to fertilize the birth of modern symbolic logic. Their excessively stupid truth tables, embodied in silicon logic circuits, form the minds of our digital computers.
A.M. Wilson, The Infinite in the Finite
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