PHIL 214 A 2242 (Fall 2024)

PHIL 214 – Deductive Logic

Fall 2024

 

Instructor: Dr. Olivia Sultanescu

Email: olivia.sultanescu@concordia.ca

Office hours: TBA

Room: MR.14

 

Teaching Assistants:

Ria Mayer (riacmayer@gmail.com)

Biyang Pan (biyangpan@gmail.com)

Bru Perron (bruno.perron@mail.concordia.ca)

 

Class schedule: Monday & Wednesday 4:15PM - 5:30PM

Room: H 535

Conferences are on Friday afternoon.

  

Course description

Arguments are essential to rational discourse.  What is distinctive of a good argument is that its conclusion follows from its premises.  But what is it for a conclusion to follow from the premises of an argument, and what are the methods that enable us to determine whether it does?  These are a couple of the questions that we will ask in this course, which is an introduction to the study of the logical features of arguments.  We will examine two logical systems, sentential logic and predicate logic.  We will translate sentences of English into the languages of these systems (and vice versa); we will analyze various logical notions, such as validity, consistency, and logical truth; and we will construct formal derivations in each of these systems. 

  

Required text

Forall X: Calgary. An Introduction to Formal Logic, by P. D. Magnus and Tim Button, remixed, revised, & expanded by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc and Richard Zach. 

The textbook is published under a Creative Commons license.  It can be downloaded at https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/. We will be using the Fall 2023 edition (revision 71e6400).