Formal Logic 1 

Logic is about reasoning. We all reason, but logic helps us distinguish what is good reasoning from bad reasoning. The study of logic improves our natural capacity to reason, and it proves especially helpful when our reasoning faces abstract and challenging questions. Formal logic is the study of what follows from what, or what inferences are valid. It originated with the work of Aristotle and it has been developing ever since.

Nowadays it is used in Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and other fields. Logic studies reasoning by means of a regimented formal language that aims at clarifying our natural languages. In class, we will cover the following topics: the nature of inference, reasoning fallacies, validity, and soundness, how to set up a formal language, logical connectives, quantifiers, truth tables, predicate calculus, and some basics of modal logic (the study of inferences on what is possible and impossible).

The course is a mix of lectures and seminars. Whereas lectures cover the nature of key logical concepts and techniques, in seminars we apply logical concepts and techniques to specific examples and learn how they work in practice. Examples of exercises are: constructing a proof of a theorem, checking in what formal models a given formula is valid, building a refutation tree of an argument.