What is logic, and why should one study it? One must first and foremost recognize that logic—as traditionally conceived and taught—exists alongside and inseparably from the other arts of the Trivium, Grammar and Rhetoric. But where the other two arts concern themselves more explicitly with the external signs of thinking, logic concerns itself primarily with the rectitude of thinking itself. It has therefore been considered in two ways, historically: as both an art and as a science. If we are to use it successfully as an art—that is, as a kind of know-how for producing determinate results in accordance with a certain plan or understanding of our own constitution—we are greatly aided by study of it as a science.
For logic can be conceived as the study of how we obtain the λόγος, the logos: best understood as the intelligibility of the real: not as it resides in the intellect, but as transcending both the intellect by which it is grasped and the cognition-independent actuality from which it is grasped, and irreducible to either. In studying logic, then, we study how we can grasp the intelligible real, in thought and in the thing, in the mind and out in the world, and in the possible connections between the two.
Of course, this demands that we understand what thought is, and how it happens; and most principally, the role of inference in the progression of thought from term to proposition, from proposition to argument, and back again. Such will be at the core of our study, which is available to all Lyceum Institute members.
Logic Schedule [2024]
Art of Logic I: Basics of Argumentation will meet twice per week (every session is recorded) on Mondays at 6pm ET and Thursdays at 12pm ET. Members may attend either or both sessions.
Monday (6pm ET)
Thursday (12pm ET)
Week I Week II Week III Week IV Week V
May 27 June 03 June 10 June 17 June 24
May 30 June 06 June 13 June 20 June 27
BREAK
July 01
July 04
Week VI Week VII Week VIII Week IX Week X
July 08 July 15 July 22 July 29 August 05
July 11 July 18 July 25 August 01 August 08
Art of Logic I: Basics of Argumentation
The first course, Basics of Argumentation, will focus on terms, propositions, and basic forms of categorical and hypothetical syllogisms. Here our principal goal is to establish the habits of discerning logical structure, principally as it appears in real prose argumentation. While logic often is taught as though one could strip away all the nuance of natural language, the approach taken here emphasizes the practice of questioning and discerning the true significance of usual patterns of speech. Though artificial methods of symbolization and analysis of operations have a utility (and a place, even, to a small extent, in this course), as an integral part of the Trivium we treat logic as concerned with the full breadth of human language.
The second course, Advanced Argumentation turns its attention to more complex relations of propositions (including modality), enthymemes and epicheiremas, extended argumentation of both categorical and hypothetical kinds, and the different modes of inference. Here, we focus primarily on deep improvements to the dexterity of our logical analysis and prepare ourselves for examining and producing more complicated arguments ourselves. By producing habits of clear thinking, we enable ourselves to dissect falsehoods and articulate complex truths to produce logical conviction in ourselves and in others.
Excerpt from Logic as a Liberal Art, “A Note to the Student”:
…before our discourse can be logical or rhetorically effective, it needs first to be grammatically correct in order to be intelligible at all…
[The approach this book takes] is to study logic in its “natural” setting, much as a scientist might study tropic plants or polar bears in their natural habitats. The natural habitat of logic is the verbal and written language of ordinary human discourse, including the high-level verbal discourse that occurs in university courses. The man who invented this approach to logic was Aristotle, who write the first textbooks in logic in the fourth century B.C. The main reason why this approach is preferable for most people is that it avoids the two problems that have plagued the teaching of symbolic logic during its heyday and up to the present. First, the verbal approach is clearly preferable for those who have math phobia. The problems used in the verbal approach are all set out in ordinary language, language that often contains clues that help us to understand the logic of verbal discourse. Such clues, of course, are missing from the mathematical symbols used in symbolic logic. Second, the very study of logic has the advantage of avoiding the problem of needing to translate back and forth between abstract logical symbols and the more concrete verbal symbols we call words. While mathematical symbols do on occasion help us see logical relations, and we will employ some elementary symbols from time to time in this book, by using ordinary or “natural” language to study logic we can avoid the large headache of translating form the language of symbols to ordinary language, and then back again. So we content ourselves with the smaller but real headaches involved in searching out the logic contained within verbal or “natural” language.
The verbal approach to logic has yet another advantage, one not very often admitted even by its proponents. We can see this one by looking at history. The verbal approach to logic and the discipline of rhetoric were invented by the Greeks, those early masters of the spoken and written word. In fact, rhetoric was invented slightly before Aristotle invented logic. Aristotle conceived of rhetoric and logic as correlative, noting that “rhetoric is the analogue of dialectic,” a subfield of logic… If you don’t pursue the verbal form of logic, then you probably won’t see the importance of rhetoric, dialectic’s twin.
Houser 2020: Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction toRhetoric and Reasoning, xxvi and xxviii.
Our primary textbook is R.E. Houser 2020: Logic as a Liberal Art.
