My experience teaching both introductory and symbolic logic at Villanova was resulting in too much overlap between the courses, with too little time for actual philosophical reflection on the ideas involved. I decided to make the introduction to logic course into more of a historical survey of various traditions of logic in the history of Western philosophy, as well as expanding the cultural breadth to consider Indian variants of Logic within the Nyāya tradition.
The class begins with a standard introduction to the usual terms using Graham Priest’s text on logic in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series, together with the handouts and manuscript textbook I used in my own intro to logic class as an undergrad. The purpose here is to familiarize everyone with the idea of logic as a teachable skill; that is, the usual bestiary—the analysis and evaluation of arguments, the concepts of deductive or inductive validity and soundness, fallacies, etc. This is conducted as a survey with active learning exercises in class to illustrate quickly and move on. I give a few quizzes to take everyone’s pulse, but the goal is not so much to pass on the skill of logic itself, as to present logic as an object for further historical analysis.
After this point, we set the clock back to Aristotle and begin reading selections from Bochenski’s A History of Formal Logic, looking at various developments of logic in the scholastic period including the infamous mnemonic poem and Aquinas’s method of disputation. Next, we look at selections from various texts by Descartes, together with the Port Royal Logic. The purpose of this section is to understand the logic we learned in the first part of the class as the product of a centuries-long process of development, including the long-standing epistemic and psychologistic elements which formerly belonged to the study of logic prior to the 19th century turn to mathematical logic. Following up on some of the texts we read on the soul in Aristotle and Aquinas, we look at Freud’s essay, “Negation,” which views logical reasoning as the product of a form of psychological repression or sublimation. The foray into Nyāya logics provides a further cultural expansion of the idea of reasoning, showcasing important similarities and divergences in approach.
Finally, we turn to the idea of logic in practical and moral consideration. We remain within the same historical trajectory, now focusing on David Hume’s distinction between statements of fact and statements of value and Kant’s formulations of the Categorical imperative. This section further explores the use of logic in moral and practical circumstances using Sarah Shute’s self-published Logic and Morality: A Pragmatic Approach, ending with Max Horkheimer’s Essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory.”
The class itself is experimental, and so much of the assignments will be active learning exercises done together in class. The primary sources in the history of philosophy are mainly short excerpts or quick essays which we closely read together in class. I am more interested in teaching logic as a form of philosophical thinking than as a skill which can be tested by completing truth tables, proofs, and other exercises that AI can now complete on a dime. While AI does not actually make the humanities obsolete, it does make formal systems of logic look more and more redundant in practice. The formal system taught here looks more like an austere set of ideals for which the mind must in turn adopt a discipline in order to prevent desire, fantasy, or convention from clouding judgment. The outcome is to teach logic as not just a mathematical system of analysis and evaluation, but also as a discipline for thinking and a prophylaxis for error and ideology.
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