Vol. 36, No. 2 _ February 2005
by Charles W. Martin

One of the most difficult required courses at Asbury College for students working toward a liberal arts degree in the early 1970s was "Introduction to Philosophy." The fact this course was required of all students gave many of them reason to think about the nature of a liberal arts degree, which is intended to provide a broad base of general knowledge and to develop the student’s general intellectual capacities. Practically speaking, this meant there were required courses in a foreign language (for 2 years), not to mention one or more courses in areas such as philosophy, history, music, speech, psychology, sociology, Western literature, and science, together with those courses in one’s selected field or major.

As special as a liberal arts degree is even today, unfor-tunately, such a degree does not cover every subject, nor does it claim to do so. Rather, the idea behind a true liberal arts degree is to prepare the student to use his or her acquired intellectual and reasoning skills toward studying those subjects not covered. For example, in the "Introduction to Philosophy" course the professor briefly dealt over a period of several days with Socrates and the Socratic method. Specifically, Socratic logic, followed by Platonic questions and Aristotelian principles. Sounds really exciting doesn’t it? Really, it was, because our professor often personified the roles of different philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Often times he came in "character" and simply began to talk - he called it "philosophizing" - and we were challenged to guess which philosopher he was portraying so that our notes would make some sense later when we studied them. But while we were introduced to Socratic logic, what we learned in a few days was a far cry from taking a course on the subject.

In this issue of the Bulletin our focus is not to introduce you to everything that might be contained in a course on Socratic logic. Rather, as the title implies, we simply want to persuade readers of the Bulletin that personally studying Socratic logic or taking a logic course at a local college or university is a great way to improve your thinking skills and, in particular, your understanding of Christian theology.

Socrates would feel it quite appropriate that we begin with some questions: Why should anyone study logic? What can you do with logic? The answers may surprise you, because it is not so much what you can do with logic, it is what logic can do for you. Peter Kreeft puts it this way in his recent text on logic:

Logic builds the mental habit of thinking in an orderly way. A course in logic will do this for you even if you forget every detail in it,....No course is more practical than logic, for no matter what you are thinking about, you are thinking, and logic orders and clarifies your thinking. No matter what your thought’s content, it will be clearer when it has more logical form (Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic, St. Augustine’s Press, 2004, 1).

Perhaps we should begin by distinguishing between the two kinds of logic. In many university and college contexts the only logic courses offered focus upon mathematical or symbolic logic, also known variously as propositional logic, syllogistic logic, and even "propositional calculus," but most often as "formal" logic." Some people refer to this as the "algebra of statements." If you were to take a course in "propositional calculus" the focus would be on deductive logic and you would spend many hours studying the relationships formed between propositions by connectives or "constants" (or "sententials") such as "not," "or," and "if...then."

In sentential or propositional logic the student learns there are only nine rules of inferences which he or she must learn, along with a few logical equivalences, in order to carry out the reasoning governed by this domain of logic. If one is equipped with the nine rules he will be able to assess the validity of most of the arguments he will ever encounter.

For example, the first rule is modus ponens, which in symbolic logic is stated this way:

1. P -> Q

2. P

3. Q