About this Website
Purpose
The main purpose of this site is to make resources available for my introductory logic classes at the University of Houston. However, I am also pleased to make this material available to anyone who can use it. Together, the videos, practice exercises, and course packet constitute an introductory course in symbolic logic. Other instructors are welcome to make use of this site, and I invite them to contact me about other materials as well, such as quizzes for use with course management software, written tests, and course notes.
Acknowledgements
All of the materials on this website owe a significant debt to Howard Pospesel’s Introduction to Propositional Logic (Prentice Hall, 2001). Pospesel’s text does an excellent job of breaking up the content of propositional logic into readily digestible pieces. By and large, I have also adopted Pospesel’s proof rules and symbolization conventions. However, I have departed from Pospesel’s approach in significant respects. Most importantly, instead of dependency columns I use boxes to show derivation relations in proofs, and my attempt to present proof construction as a largely mechanical procedure is not part of Pospesel’s approach. I also teach what Pospesel calls single-sided truth trees as opposed to his preferred two-sided trees. Other departures include my diagrammatic presentation of proof rules, and use of the tilde for “not” as opposed to the dash.
I have benefitted enormously from the teaching and guidance of my past professor and current colleague, James Garson. From him, I adopted the box method for conditional proof (>in) and indirect proof (~in/~out), as well as the use of single-sided truth trees. Moreover, my course packet was originally inspired by his own, and working on online exercises for his classes was the impetus to create the practice exercises on this site. But more importantly, I’ve been influenced in countless ways by his patience, rigor and enthusiasm as a teacher and a mentor. It’s very unlikely I would teach logic at all if not for his influence (and the fact that he hired me at UH!).
To Richard Grandy I owe my appreciation of logic as a philosophical tool, not to mention an extremely large portion of my philosophical education. As a graduate student at Rice University, I took numerous classes with him, and my thought about all issues is forever improved because of it.
Other instructors and colleagues from whom my logic classes have benefitted include William Nelson, William Austin, and Bob Yoes. They’ve all made me a better teacher.
I have also gained a great deal from graduate students/friends at UH. Among them are: Alireza Fatollahi, Michael Hartley, Ami Palmer, and David Poston. Others deserving special mention include Kyle Landrum who helped construct practice exercises in Summer 2014 and Andrew Chau who constructed exercises in 2010 and helped me organize my initial thoughts about this website. I’d also like to mention Carl Feierabend who kept me sane and motivated for a number of years via excellent conversation and games of Go. Most significantly, there is James Hulgan, one of my first TA’s who has assisted me in ways too numerous to count, and remains an excellent friend.
Finally, I have taught nearly 150 sections of logic since 2000. I have had well over 5000 students. They are diverse people with diverse skills and interests, and I am often impressed by their hard work, their curiosity and their cheerfulness. I suspect I owe them the largest debt.
Tools
This website was built with RapidWeaver on a Macintosh. It’s hosted on iPage. The practice exercises were created using a customized version of Hot Potatoes, an html quiz builder abandoned long ago by it’s developer. Most of the videos were created using the screen recording program Camtasia, while working in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet.
Purpose
The main purpose of this site is to make resources available for my introductory logic classes at the University of Houston. However, I am also pleased to make this material available to anyone who can use it. Together, the videos, practice exercises, and course packet constitute an introductory course in symbolic logic. Other instructors are welcome to make use of this site, and I invite them to contact me about other materials as well, such as quizzes for use with course management software, written tests, and course notes.
Acknowledgements
All of the materials on this website owe a significant debt to Howard Pospesel’s Introduction to Propositional Logic (Prentice Hall, 2001). Pospesel’s text does an excellent job of breaking up the content of propositional logic into readily digestible pieces. By and large, I have also adopted Pospesel’s proof rules and symbolization conventions. However, I have departed from Pospesel’s approach in significant respects. Most importantly, instead of dependency columns I use boxes to show derivation relations in proofs, and my attempt to present proof construction as a largely mechanical procedure is not part of Pospesel’s approach. I also teach what Pospesel calls single-sided truth trees as opposed to his preferred two-sided trees. Other departures include my diagrammatic presentation of proof rules, and use of the tilde for “not” as opposed to the dash.
I have benefitted enormously from the teaching and guidance of my past professor and current colleague, James Garson. From him, I adopted the box method for conditional proof (>in) and indirect proof (~in/~out), as well as the use of single-sided truth trees. Moreover, my course packet was originally inspired by his own, and working on online exercises for his classes was the impetus to create the practice exercises on this site. But more importantly, I’ve been influenced in countless ways by his patience, rigor and enthusiasm as a teacher and a mentor. It’s very unlikely I would teach logic at all if not for his influence (and the fact that he hired me at UH!).
To Richard Grandy I owe my appreciation of logic as a philosophical tool, not to mention an extremely large portion of my philosophical education. As a graduate student at Rice University, I took numerous classes with him, and my thought about all issues is forever improved because of it.
Other instructors and colleagues from whom my logic classes have benefitted include William Nelson, William Austin, and Bob Yoes. They’ve all made me a better teacher.
I have also gained a great deal from graduate students/friends at UH. Among them are: Alireza Fatollahi, Michael Hartley, Ami Palmer, and David Poston. Others deserving special mention include Kyle Landrum who helped construct practice exercises in Summer 2014 and Andrew Chau who constructed exercises in 2010 and helped me organize my initial thoughts about this website. I’d also like to mention Carl Feierabend who kept me sane and motivated for a number of years via excellent conversation and games of Go. Most significantly, there is James Hulgan, one of my first TA’s who has assisted me in ways too numerous to count, and remains an excellent friend.
Finally, I have taught nearly 150 sections of logic since 2000. I have had well over 5000 students. They are diverse people with diverse skills and interests, and I am often impressed by their hard work, their curiosity and their cheerfulness. I suspect I owe them the largest debt.
Tools
This website was built with RapidWeaver on a Macintosh. It’s hosted on iPage. The practice exercises were created using a customized version of Hot Potatoes, an html quiz builder abandoned long ago by it’s developer. Most of the videos were created using the screen recording program Camtasia, while working in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet.