PHGA 5100 Logic
Professor Bryan Francis
Spring 2008
Tuesday, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Symbolic logic is for students who want to stop fussing around with shoddy reasoning, both in philosophy and everyday life.

Human thought has a marvelous structure. Logicians devise symbolic systems in order to model large, interesting, and important aspects of that structure. Only by learning one of those symbol systems does one see and appreciate the structure of thought. And once one is familiar with a powerful model of thought, one can use it to reason much more clearly and carefully than one ever did before. This holds even if one does not symbolize one’s reasoning.

Although Aristotle, the Stoics, and others made progress with logical symbol systems, the early twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the scope and power of those systems through the construction of formal languages. In this course students consider the modern development of formal logical techniques including propositional logic and first-order logic with identity. Every now and then I will give everyone a break by spending lecture time going over some logic issues that are not in the book, not covered on the exams, and philosophically fascinating.

We will use The Logic Book by Bergmann, Moor, and Nelson (4th edition), and we'll cover almost all of the book.