PHIL 120

PHIL 120: Symbolic Logic I
Instructor: Hassan Masoud

This is an introductory course in symbolic logic which covers what is known as ‘elementary logic’. Symbolic logic is a mathematical model of logical reasoning. This course covers both sentential logic (or logic of propositions) and predicate logic (or logic of quantifiers). In each of sentential logic and predicate logic, three topics are discussed:

- Language and Syntax
- Semantics
- Derivations

 The goal of the first topic, roughly, is to learn how to translate sentences from natural language to a symbolic language; the second topic is concerned with the interpretation of symbolic sentences; and the third with giving proofs (derivations) by using inference rules. The proof method adopted in this course is natural deduction.