NEIL W. TENNANT
tennant.9@osu.edu
If you email me, please use the header PHIL 150: YOURNAME.
Professor
Department of Philosophy
|
Winter Term 2004
PHIL 150 LR
|
|
tennant.9@osu.edu
If you email me, please use the header PHIL 150: YOURNAME.
Professor
Department of Philosophy
This course is an introduction to logic, which seeks to avoid, as far as is practicable, unnecessary symbolism and technicalities. The focus is on 'ordinary language' analysis of good and bad argumentation. The student will learn to distinguish between deductive and inductive arguments, and will acquire some sense of how these are to be appraised. We shall learn how to construct good arguments, and criticize bad ones, by standards appropriate to their kind. The rigorous scrutiny of argumentation that this course teaches will stand the student in good stead in all other courses in the humanities and/or sciences, and will prepare the student for the more formal techniques of argumentative analysis offered in the next course in this sequence, Philosophy 250: Introduction to Symbolic Logic. Winter Term 2004
PHIL 150 LR
Introduction to Logic
Lectures
255 Townshend Hall
10:30 a.m. - 12:18 p.m.
Summaries of lecture material
Assessment
Class Calendar
Administrative announcements
Policy on attendance at classes
Accommodations for Disabilities
Handouts
Aims
We shall be covering topics drawn from the following list: Topics
Validity of arguments, both deductive and inductive. Assertion v. assumption. Consistency. Contradiction. The general problem of how to justify a belief. Rules of inference. The axiomatic method. Canons of induction. Fallacies. The methods by which theories and laws are tested.
Irving M. Copi and Keith Burgess-Jackson Informal Logic, 3rd. edn., Prentice Hall. Textbook
Assigned readings
On-line resources
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
