PHIL 155.001 – Introduction to Mathematical Logic

Instructor: Gillian Russell. This course meets MW 9:05 – 9:55 a.m. in GA 008, with a recitation on Fridays.

This course is an introduction to mathematical logic for students who have not taken a course in the subject before. Logic is the study of arguments and their properties, where an argument is a set of statements, one of which is supposed to follow from, or be supported by, the others, as in:  (1) Socrates is a man.  All men are mortal.  Therefore, Socrates is mortal.  Or (2) Gillian Russell is a woman.  All women are immortal.  Therefore, Gillian Russell is immortal.  In logic we are interested in characterising what makes an argument a good argument, and our methods for doing this will look rather mathematical.  Your homework for this course will involve completing problem sets, and there will be two exams.  We will study the semantics and proof theory for truth-functional logic and first order predicate logic with quantifiers, concluding with soundness and completeness proofs. (By the end of the course you would know what that last sentence means.)