Dear PHIL 305, You Suck.

So.

There's this thing called University. There are many of them, actually. You know, institutes of higher education.

I've been to a few of them. Taken classes. Learned. Etc. You know how it goes.

There's one thing I never did at University (well, probably many things I never did) and that is to Graduate.

Shock! Horror! Collective panic!

I know. I went to four schools over the course of 9+ years. Honestly, I was very well educated. I received a rigorous, diverse and sometimes eclectic education and was very well prepared for life and work. I wouldn't change a thing about the way I went about my schooling.


And I have ONE class yet to take before receiving my diploma. ONE. Three credits. One course.

(I left school to deal with some health issues, knowing I could take my last two courses online. I finished one last year. I took a fantastic job five years ago and never looked back.)

The time has come to take the class. I can't put it off any longer because if I do it will interfere with my personal goals.

But MY GOODNESS. This class just may kill me. Murder. Me. I've been looking over the Course Prerequisites online, you see.

I'll be taking Philosophy 305. It fulfills my language requirements. Wierd, huh? But not really, because philosophy is seriously mathematical and like a foreign language. Math and I don't get along. Classroom language courses and I don't get along. This class = Not.A.Good.Idea.


But there it is.


These are the prereqs:

Course Prerequisites

Presumably, your first logic course was BYU's Philosophy 205 or a comparable beginning course in formal logic. I don't want to bore you with a laundry list, but here is what I assume you know and can do: (1) You must understand these terms: argument, valid, sound, negation, conjunction, disjunction, conditional statement, antecedent, consequent, tautology, contingency, self-contradiction, implication, and equivalence. (2) You should be able to appraise the validity of syllogisms using some standard method such as Venn diagrams. (3) You must be able to use standard notation for truth-functional logic, and you should be able to appraise the validity of truth-functional arguments using some standard method such as truth tables. (4) You must know and be able to use fluently a standard system of rules for constructing proofs for valid truth-functional arguments as well as the usual proof strategies (such as conditional proof, indirect proof, and proof by cases), and you must be able to use such rules to demonstrate validity, tautologicality, implication, and equivalence. (5) This course starts from scratch with quantificational logic (sometimes called predicate calculus), but it would obviously help if you have had some introduction to quantifiers as well.

--


Is it just me that is already lost? Tautologicality? Quantificational?
I took Phil205 at BYU. I pretty much remember the word fallacy and what a straw-man argument is. Yah. I've got a lot of studying to do (I still have my textbook from 205, thankfully!)


Mind you, I just need to pass. PASS. I was a very good student throughout my schooling. D's and F's didn't happen. C's either. A's and B's were my thing. But this course, this very last course, sure I'd like to ace it. Realistically though, I'd be happy to pass.

So, there you have it. I have to pass this class. Then I is gonna be officially a college grad. Yippee.


And not to get ahead of myself, but there are some very, very exciting things that are going to happen once I finish this course. You are all going to be amazed.
:)