Welcome to the Web site for PHIL 240, Formal Logic I. You’ll find the course syllabus, one of the texts, links to a variety of online resources, and a link to the class’s Discussion Forum just below. Other materials will be forthcoming soon. If you have any questions about the course that the syllabus doesn’t answer, please don’t hesitate to drop the instructor a note.
Course Materials
- Syllabus (.pdf file—approximately 92K)
- Basic Symbolic Skills (.pdf file—approximately 792K)
- Other materials available soon on Blackboard
Links
- “Arguments and Their Evaluation”—a “crash course in logic” designed to give you the vocabulary you need to talk and think about arguments. Topics include: (1) what arguments are, (2) the ways in which they can succeed or fail, and (3) what you have to do to dig the arguments out of philosophical texts. We’ll be using this as an assigned text during the first week of the course.
- Stephen’s Guide to the Logical Fallacies—a taxonomy of “the known logical fallacies”; a very useful catalog of ways in which one can fail as a reasoner.
- The Fallacy Files by Gary Curtis—a rather more thorough discussion of logical fallacies than Stephen’s Guide. Still, Stephen’s Guide has its fans, because it’s just a less complicated site. The Fallacy Files has been pronounced the “best web site on fallacies” by Austhink’s Critical Thinking on the Web.
- “Infinite Reflections”—an easy-to-read discussion of infinite sets by Peter Suber of Earlham College. This (and perhaps especially the appendix, linked to separately just below) will be of interest to you as we begin to explore the set-theoretical foundations of modern mathematical logic.
- “A Crash Course on the Mathematics of Infinite Sets”—the appendix to “Infinite Reflections,” well worth reading all by itself.
- Other Logic-Related Links—the list of course-related links for Suber’s class on “Logical Systems.” This site is no longer actively maintained, but there is very interesting and useful material on it. Try Googling the text of any dead links. Many of the materials pointed to by dead links are still accessible on the Web, albeit in new and different places.
- Euclid’s Elements. Trans. David E. Joyce. An extremely interesting on-line edition of the Elements featuring Java-enhanced constructions and a good deal more. Euclid’s Elements was the paradigm of mathematical reasoning for two millennia. It’s one of most important texts, from a historical point of view, in the history of Western scientific thinking in the broad sense of the term in which science includes not only what we usually think of as science but mathematics and philosophy as well.
A couple more local links related to logic:
Class Forum
