Course info

(Updated September 2017)

This module is recommended for Philosophy students and open to students from other disciplines. The module provides intensive training in the skills and methods required for university-level work in philosophy and related disciplines. This course will focus on building and honing the writing skills and techniques appropriate to philosophical prose, and on the identification and evaluation of arguments.

Two-hour sessions will be held weekly during the autumn term, with a revision session in the summer term. Students will be given the opportunity to discuss their coursework in tutorial sessions with an instructor, in order to receive close feedback on essay-writing skills and methods.

Logic comes in two main kinds: formal and informal. Formal logic attempts to express and evaluate arguments using a specialised logical notation or set of symbols, whereas informal logic does the same in natural language (although it does operate with its own specialised vocabulary, which sometimes differs from ordinary English). In this course, the focus will be on informal logic.

Even without knowing it, we all already use informal logic to some extent. We regard some arguments as successful and others as unsuccessful in establishing their conclusions, and we may be able to give reasons why some arguments succeed and others fail. We may also recognise and distinguish between different kinds of argumentative move: the 'slippery slope argument', the ad hominem, or reductio ad absurdum. However, our grasp of these is often vague or implicit. The aim of this part of the course is to develop and sharpen this implicit understanding, by subjecting to critical scrutiny a range of key concepts, such as: validity, soundness, inference, deduction, induction, abduction (or 'inference to the best explanation'), and credence, as well as some of main ways in which arguments can go wrong ('fallacies'). These concepts help to understand and classify the arguments we come across, whether in philosophical prose or in other forms (such as the newspaper article or the political speech).

In order to achieve the aims of the module, students will be expected to complete weekly homework assignments. Of these, students may select what they judge to be their best work to develop into their final, non-formative coursework for Autumn Term, due at the end of that term. This may take the form of either two essays of 1500 words each, or one longer essay of 3000 words.

Please note: Week 8 of the autumn term will be Reading Week and there will be no lecture/class unless notified otherwise by Matteo Falomi

In order to achieve the aims of the module, students will be expected to complete weekly homework assignments. Of these, two assignments (essays of approximately 2000 words, or a set of logic exercises) will comprise the formal coursework for the module. Equal weighting will be given to each of the two formally marked assignments when calculating the final coursework mark.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the autumn term students should:

1. be able to identify and articulate arguments as presented in philosophical and other forms of prose;
2. have developed a range of skills for the assessment of arguments;
3. be able to identify informal argumentative fallacies;
4. have enhanced and developed their ability to write clear, forceful, argumentative essays in which arguments from published works are presented and critically assessed, and in which a thesis is critically defended.