When I was in junior high school, I had a horse named Lady Anne that could count to three. I would say, “Count to three!” and she would scrape the ground three times with her right hoof. She could do it for one and two as well. She also nodded her head when she was […]
Tag Archives: logic
One of the questions people ask about traditional logic is why it doesn’t teach truth tables. Modern logic, the most common kind of logic encountered in high school and college, uses them, so why does traditional logic ignore them? Many people encounter a smattering of logic in high school math courses. Here, more than likely, […]
Modern educators love to talk about “critical thinking skills,” but not one in a hundred even knows what he means by the term. Every time our country goes through an education reform spasm—which it has undergone about every twenty-five years since the 1920s—the education establishment trots out a set of slogans that always sounds good […]
In 1969, philosopher Henry Veatch wrote a book called Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. It scandalized the philosophical establishment of the day. The book challenged the underlying assumptions behind the new logic that had been taught in colleges and universities for over fifty years. The issues addressed in the book were […]
Several years ago, a prominent homeschool personality, let’s call him “Mr. Jones” (The names have been changed to protect the mistaken), wrote a broadside in a popular magazine against classical education, leveling a number of charges against it. These arguments were representative of the criticisms you sometimes hear from those who have a misapprehension of […]
Why a Knowledge of Grammar Is Indispensable for an Understanding of Logic I meet a lot of homeschool mothers at conventions all over the country and one of the most common questions I get is this: “What do you do for a critical thinking skills program before we do your logic program in the seventh grade?” […]
Reason #3: Science In the last two issues of the Classical Teacher, I gave several reasons why Christians should read the pagans. I talked about their contributions to architecture and discussed what they knew about virtue from the natural world which God created. These were some of the more obvious reasons. But there is another […]
If book sales and public attention are any measure, atheism is enjoying a noticeable renaissance in recent years. Best-selling books by famous atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris now frequently appear on the best-seller lists, and atheist voices are louder and more emboldened than they have ever been. One of the arguments leveled against […]
If you wanted to learn to be a mathematician, you wouldn’t want to just read about mathematics; you would want to actually do math. If you wanted to learn how to write, you wouldn’t settle for just reading about writing; you would want instruction that involved actually writing yourself. The same thing goes for music […]
Both “A” and “not A” cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect. Napoleon was the emperor of France or he was not; water is made of two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule or it is not—in each case, both things cannot be true at the same time in the […]