Chances
are pretty good that you’ve already had some
philosophical conversations, either with yourself or with other people. Think
back to some of those long talks about the existence of God, the nature of
reality, the meaning of life, the possibility of love, the essence of morality,
or anything like that. Hopefully, you enjoyed those
conversations. But no matter how enjoyable they
were, I bet they were confusing on some level.
Philosophical
questions are a lot like beautiful, green forests. They’re so attractive that
it’s hard to resist walking into them. And the further
you walk, the darker things get and before very long you’re lost or walking in
circles.
Learning
a little logic is a lot like learning how to use a compass and a map. Learning
how to use a compass and a map might not be quite as exciting as
exploring the woods, but it makes exploring the woods a lot easier and
more enjoyable. Similarly, learning a little logic might not be quite as
exciting as the philosophical questions we’ll be studying, but it gives us a
framework we can use as we tackle those interesting philosophical questions. And without some kind of framework like this, it’s very easy
to get lost or to find ourselves going in circles.
Studying
logic is also important in its own right. For one thing, I find it
enjoyable and hopefully you will too. For another
thing, learning even just a little logic can help you to think a lot
more clearly in every area of your life. So it’s
definitely worth our while to take some time to learn logic before we jump
right in to deep philosophical questions.
The
general idea behind the logic we’ll be studying is that we can represent a
piece of philosophical reasoning with a diagram that exposes its components and
the relationships between these components. This, in turn, will help us to
better understand and evaluate the piece of reasoning.
For
the purposes of the philosophical readings we’ll be seeing, you’ll want to be
able to
1) recognize
the parts of a piece of philosophical reasoning when it’s written as a normal
passage,
2) understand
the diagram of a piece of reasoning, and
3) evaluate a piece
of reasoning when presented with its diagram.
This
“mini” course in logic is designed to give you these
skills.
And here’s an important study tip: As you progress through this
lesson, please do not worry about taking notes. If you know that you
happen to learn better that way, of course, then by all means
take notes as you go along. But you don’t have
to take notes because
·
there will be a summary of what we’ve learned at the end of
each example, and
·
there will be a cumulative summary at the end of the
lesson.
Plan
to print out these summaries in lieu of writing things down. Your only job as
you work through this lesson is to focus on understanding what we do.
Let’s
take a look at Example
1.