PHIL 455.001 – Symbolic Logic

Instructor: Jim Pryor. This course meets MW 11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. in CW 208.

This course aims to equip advanced students of philosophy and related fields (linguistics, computer science, math) with foundations to deal with logic in papers they read and write, and discussions they participate in.

We’ll be discussing a range of issues in logic and metalogic, and some in math and formal semantics. Our aim will be to give you a broad understanding of the tools and concepts, and philosophical problems relevant to them, moreso than developing your skills at proving things within any formal logics.

The course presupposes and builds on a first logic course that worked with quantifiers and the identity sign. Instead of working inside formal systems like that, much of this course will be theorizing about those systems (and others). That is, we’ll be learning tools for doing metalogic, and some major metalogical results, having to do with the completeness of various deductive systems, which questions can be mechanically decided and which cannot, and the impossibility of axiomatizing all the truths of standard arithmetic.

Instructor permission is required to enroll in this course. Please email Prof. Jim Pryor at jimpryor@unc.edu for permission to add. PHIL grad students are exempt from this enrollment requirement.

Prerequisite (for undergraduates): PHIL 155.