Makinson, David

This course is available on the BSc in Philosophy and Economics, BSc in Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method and BSc in Politics and Philosophy. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course is available to General Course students.

Students must have completed Logic (PH101).

The aim of the course is to render students of philosophy familiar with the elements of naive set theory, classical logic, and modal logic. From set theory, the course covers both ‘working’ set theory as a tool for use in formal reasoning, and ‘conceptual’ set theory of philosophical interest in itself particularly in its treatment of infinite sets, cardinals and ordinals. From classical logic, the course deals with propositional and first-order inference from both semantic and axiomatic viewpoints. The material on modal logic presents the main modal propositional systems and their analysis using relational models. Throughout, a balance is sought between formal proof and intuition, as also between technical competence and conceptual reflection.

15 hours of lectures and 8 hours of classes in the MT. 15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT.

Students are required to write one essay each term on a topic from a list and are supposed to hand in solutions for two sets of problems.

Sections of: Makinson, David 2012 Sets, Logic and Maths for Computing, 2nd edition. Springer; Cameron, Peter 1999 Sets, Logic and Categories. Springer; Sider, Theodore 2010 Logic for Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

Sections of: Crossley, John 1972 What is Mathematical Logic? (Dover reprint 1991); Goble, Lou ed 2001 The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic (Blackwell); Halmos, Paul Naive Set Theory (Springer reprint 2011); Smith, Peter 2014 Gödel without (too many) tears http://www.logicmatters.net/igt/godel-without-tears/; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/.

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the main exam period.