Logic I 3800-L1-DON-ZK

The course offers an introduction to modern logic, with its distinctive methods and applications to some philosophical problems. One of our objectives is to improve the students’ skills in rational reasoning by showing that language has various, often complex, functions; to this end, we concentrate on teaching how to construct definitions and classifications, how to distinguish vague utterances from claims, justified from unwarranted beliefs, and sound from unsound arguments. Symbolic logic of propositional and predicate calculus will be studied to acquaint the student with elementary formal methods of evaluating arguments couched in natural language. This will allow us to bring into sharper focus the basic concepts of analytical and logical truth, contradiction, entailment, as well as the principles of the natural deduction systems of propositional and predicate logic. We also provide basic notions of set theory. Finally, we examine formal and informal fallacies of arguments, definitions and classifications, and present some methods of evaluating non-deductive (inductive and analogical) types of inference.