The original authors of this work, the late George Boolos and Richard Jeffrey, stated in the preface to the first edition that the work was intended for students of philosophy, mathematics, or other fields who desired a more advanced knowledge of logic than is supplied by an introductory course or textbook on the subject, and added the following:

Such have remained the aims of all subsequent editions.

The “principal fundamental theoretical results about logic” are primarily the theorems of Gödel, the completeness theorem, and especially the incompleteness theorems, with their attendant lemmas and corollaries. The “other meta-logical results” included have been of two kinds. On the one hand, filling roughly the first third of the book, there is an extended exposition by Richard Jeffrey of the theory of Turing machines, a topic frequently alluded to in the literature of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive studies but often omitted in textbooks on the level of this one.