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 Historyof Philosophy.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 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 of Avicenna and other logicians in the Islamic world.

Apart from that, I think my experiences with logic had been pretty typical for a philosopher

who does not work directly in philosophy of logic. On the one hand, it's useful to have a grasp of the basics.

On the other hand, once a card-carrying logician gets you in their grasp,

they're going to go beyond what is merely useful to explore logical issues more deeply,

because the logicians are interested in these problems for their own sake.

This pattern is not specific to modern-day analytical philosophy.

...