PHIL138-19SU1 (C) Summer Jan 2019 start

Logic and Critical Thinking

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Thursday, 3 January 2019
End Date: Sunday, 10 February 2019
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 13 January 2019
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 27 January 2019

Description

Thinking rationally involves many skills. This course will help students acquire and develop those skills.

Logic is about how to think rationally and critically. This six week course teaches students a wide variety of tools for reasoning in both academic contexts and daily life. It focuses specifically on the basic principles of deductive logic—on what arguments are and how to evaluate them to see if they are rationally persuasive. The tools it covers include truth tables, the tree method, and how to identify common fallacies of reasoning. The skills taught will be beneficial both to philosophy and non-philosophy students, and include an enhanced ability to assess academic texts critically and think independently about them. This is a course for everyone, and no prior knowledge of logic is required.

Learning Outcomes

Students will acquire the following knowledge and skills:
1. An understanding of the notions of truths, arguments, validity, and soundness.
2. The ability to identify arguments in texts.
3. The ability to analyse arguments using logical notation and rules of inference.
4. The ability to use the tree method.
5. A familiarity with the different types of identity relation.
6. The ability to recognise logical fallacies in non-academic contexts.
7. An enhanced ability to effectively analyse arguments in philosophy.
8. Enhanced problem solving and argument-construction

University Graduate Attributes

This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:

Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award

Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.

Restrictions

PHIL132 (prior to 2006), MATH130, PHIL134/MATH134

Timetable Note

Two 2-hour lectures per week
Two 1-hour tutorial per week

Course Coordinator

Douglas Campbell

Lecturer

Zhuo-Ran Deng

Assessment

Six weekly quizzes at 5% each = 30%
Two in-class tests at 35% each = 70%

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $761.00

International fee $3,188.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Humanities .

All PHIL138 Occurrences

  • PHIL138-19SU1 (C) Summer Jan 2019 start
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