Kneale's interest in the history of logic began in the 1940s. The focus of much of Kneale's early work was the legacy of the work of the 19th century logician George Boole. His first major publication in the history of logic was his paper "Boole and the Revival of Logic," published in the philosophy journal Mind in 1948. He was also the author of a number of papers in philosophical logic, particularly on the nature of truth for natural languages, and the role that linguistic concepts play in the treatment of logical paradoxes.
Kneale worked on his great history of logic from 1947 to 1957 together with his wife Martha (who was responsible for the chapters on the ancient Greeks). The result was the 800-page The Development of Logic, first published in 1962, which went through five impressions before going into a second, paperback, edition in 1984.
The 'History' is commonly referred to in the academic world simply as "Kneale and Kneale". It was the only major history of logic available in English in the mid-twentieth century, and the first major history of logic in English since The Development of Symbolic Logic published in 1906 by A. T. Shearman. The treatise has been a standard work in the history of logic for decades.
