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I have two aims for the course. By the end of the course you should be able to:
Ò Carry out proofs in a powerful formal system; and
Ò Be familiar with many of the logical concepts you will need for completing
any non-logic subject in a philosophy graduate course.
These two aims are in some tension. If I just cared about the first, I would
spend all our time working with (more or less) uninterpreted formal systems,
and seeing who could master the most complicated proofs. (For a little sample
of what I would try and have you do, try exercise 13.51 in LPL without using
any of the Con rules.) If I just cared about the second, I would focus on things
like the informal reasoning discussed in chapter 5 of LPL, and then leave the
book for a more extended discussion of concepts like necessity and provability.
Since I care about both these things, I will try and balance these aims as much
as possible.
The primary textbook for the course, as you probably know by now, is:
Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy, Language, Proof and Logic. CSLI
Press, 2002.
This book will be (and has been) referred to as LPL in these notes, and in most
notes I distribute. The first eleven or so weeks of the course will be heavily
based around this book, though I may distribute some supplemental notes on
various topics when they become salient.
In the notes, as well as listing the reading for each class, I note the
exercises from the book I expect you to do (and turn in!) before each Monday
class. These should be considered more important than the reading. Logic is not
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like other parts of philosophy; you cannot passively learn it. (More precisely,
you will get even less out of a logic course if you try to passively learn it than
you would get out of courses in metaphysics, or ethics, or other areas – not that
passive learning is particularly encouraged in those areas either.)
As you will have noticed already, the textbook is a text/software
package. One implication of this is that many of the exercises can be (and
should be) submitted electronically. One problem is that people who bought
second hand textbooks may not be able to submit work electronically. Since
the bookshop was advised not to sell second-hand books, hopefully this won’t
be a serious problem. If it is a serious problem, let me know and we’ll try and
work out a new arrangement.
At the end of the course we will do a small section on extending what
we’ve learned to deal with counterfactual and modal claims. These concepts
are very important throughout philosophy and may be the most useful things
you’ll learn in this course. For this section we will use David Velleman’s
web-based textbook Blogic, available at
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Logic/
We’ll be looking mainly at chapter 4, but since Velleman uses slightly different
notation to LPL, we’ll have to spend a little time getting up to speed on his
notation.
Grading System
Regular submitted work: 60%
Midterm test: 10%
Final test: 30%
For each week’s classes I list reading and exercises. The reading should be done
before the relevant week, or at the latest during the week we are discussing the
material in class. The work is due by 8 a.m. the following Monday (if to be
done electronically) or the following Monday’s class (if to be done on paper).
You can (and where possible should) do the work while doing the reading, but
in some cases it will be difficult, and you will want to wait until hearing my
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pearls of wisdom before doing the work. But there will often be too much work
to be done on the weekend, and you will need to do some of the exercises after
Monday’s and Wednesday’s classes in order to keep the workload manageable.
In the work section of the syllabus I list a series of numbers; these are exercises
from LPL.
NB: Many of the terms in the syllabus will probably be rather unfamiliar to
you if you haven’t taken a logic course before. Some will be unfamiliar even if
you have. This is a common problem in technical courses - see any advanced
mathematics syllabus for similar examples. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a
problem. If you want any of the terms explained in more detail, let me know.
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