The class isn’t required in the sense that other classes at my school do not require them. However, most likely it is required for someone wanting to transfer to a 4 year school as a philosophy major. Logic at this school seems to fill up, though there are very few phil majors at this school (and elsewhere of course). In fact, they only offer Intro to Phil, Intro to Logic, World Religions and Intro to Ethics. Pretty weak, though I guess the local sister school provides more history. There’s actually a JC further away that actually offers 8 courses. They have intro to logic, critical thinking and intro to symbolic logic. They also have ancient philosophy and a philosophy of religion course. I would love to teach there.

Well, I would love to consider those texts, but sounds like I could keep them for myself! You’ll probably have to wait for a few months when it’s time to consider texts for the Spring Semester. Although I guess I could try now. You might be able to as well. Sometimes publishers suspect that it’s a student trying to get a free textbook, so you could “legitimitize” it a little by sending them to your department. Or you could have your dept. secretary do it, since they do those things for the profs all the time (assuming that they’d do it). Notice I’m only talking about possibilities and probabilities, since I’m only stating the fact that you could take this action. I’m not endorsing it, nor am I suggesting to you that it’s morally proper. I intend no normativity here.

There’s a class at Georgia State University called “Critical Thinking” that students can take in order fulfill a core requirement. This class is taught primarily by master’s students.

It seems that from my experience - I took the class when I first got back into school as a post-bacc - people had an easier time understanding inductive over deductive reasoning. I would imagine this is the case because people generally reason inductively, e.g. analogically or via inductive generalization, more so than they do deductively (e.g. modus ponens, tollens, etc). At least they’re more aware of their reasoning process when they do so in the inductive manner.

I’ve also noticed that people had difficulties discerning the difference between terms like truth, validity, and soundness (”How can an argument with false presmises and conclusion still be valid?”). Sentential operators also seemed artificial. For instance, people tend to use the disjunction exclusively, you either get the soup or the salad, not both. Material conditionals are even worse (”How can a statement with a false antecedent and a true consequent still be true?”). So trying to do stuff like truth tables and natural deduction seems tough if people don’t have a conceptual grasp of how the formal language works.

If the class isn’t required, then there’s a better chance that you’ll have students who are generally interested in the topic. Having students reconstruct arguments given in op-ed pages and transcripts of pundit shows will help give a practical connection to what they’re learning. Of course, it doesn’t have to be all politics. Movie and music reviews, as well as sports columnists, might be helpful as well.

I guess my general point would be that most students today have a difficult time thinking abstractly, so using a liberal amount of concrete examples will hopefully ease the transition from whatever intuitive reasoning that they’re currently using to formal logic.

Free logic books, eh? Can you say that you’re “considering” using either Hughes & Cresswell or Fitting & Mendelsohn and send those books my way?

No, it’s not a required class for anything, so I don’t know what to expect actually.

As for curiculum, it’s really up to me. In haste, I decided to use Hurley’s Concise Intro to Logic, which is expensive, but pretty broad (at a cost), giving instructors a lot of flexibility. It even has suggestions if you want to teach a general intro class, or a critical thinking type, or something on formal logic (though no modal logic! I thought that was a con of this book.). It’s a typical textbook for JC’s. There’s some critical thinking stuff, but there’s a good amount of syllogistic, propositonal and predicate logic. I think I’m going to lean toward a slightly more critical thinking type class with a good dose of symbolic (propositional) logic. Predicate logic might be too difficult and less “practical.” I’m hoping that students can actually apply what they learn. (Good luck to me!) It’s too hard to do everything in one class. I’m planning to use this semester as a test run. If they seem to handle things fine, then I’ll make it a bit more difficult the next term. Due to the flexibility of the text, I can make changes without having to reread through another textbook, even though this one isn’t that special in any one area. The cool thing is, since I’m teaching my own class, I get to have free copies of any book in Logic that I am “considering” adopting for my own course. Good luck to you.

Are there any requirements as far as the curriculum is concerned? What material are you required to cover? Do you have to cover sentential and predicate symbolic logic, or can you get away with just focusing on more critical thinking topics (e.g. basic rules of inference, inductive reasoning, informal fallacies)?

Also, is this a required class for the students? If not, then hopefully interest levels will be higher.

Apparently, Phil 211 (Intro to Logic), was voted one of the hardest classes at UWM. We are going to use Klenk’s Symbolic Logic and the course goes all the way up to (and I think including) relational predicate logic. This class is supposed to be for people with no prior experience with logic, so I have my work cut out for me. Yikes!