HoP 487 Showing Good Judgment: The Port Royal Logic

Peter Adamson· Host0:00

[instrumental music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to The History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Showing Good Judgment: The Port Royal Logic. When I got to graduate school, I was required to take a course in advanced logic. It was a struggle. I hadn't taken any classes in logic when I was an undergraduate, so it was only with the help of my better prepared fellow students that I was able to get the homework assignments done and pass the final exam. It was corrected over the summer, so I got the exam back only at the beginning of the following academic year. I remember looking through it, amazed by the fact that even though the solutions were in my own handwriting, I couldn't understand any of it because I'd forgotten everything in the intervening months. Fortunately, since then I haven't needed most of what we learned. Yet, I do not regret taking the class because to do philosophy seriously, you really need to have mastered some logic. It's useful just to know what all the symbols and notations mean, and more profoundly, to be able to analyze an argument with full rigor. And as it happens, I've wound up being pretty interested in Aristotelian logic and very interested in the transformation of his system at the hands