Core Logic 2007/2008; 1st Semester Institute for Logic, Language & Computation Universiteit van Amsterdam

Instructor: Dr Benedikt Löwe
Vakcode: MolCL6
ECTS: 6
Time: Wednesday 15-18
Place: P 0.17
Course language: English
Teaching Assistant: Drs Sara Uckelman (suckelma@illc.uva.nl)
Intended Audience: M.Sc. students of Logic

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of logic. (If students feel that they don't satisfy this criterion, they should take the course "Basic Logic" in addition to Core Logic.)

Goal of this course. This course is the obligatory course for the M.Sc. Programme in Logic in the first semester. It is the time and place to meet for all of the logic students. In addition to that, the course should give a broad historical overview of logic in general, and with particular emphasis of the areas of research that the ILLC is involved in.

Content of the course: This course will cover the history of logic from Aristotle to the XXIst century. We will discuss the Greeks, the Middle Ages, Enlightenment, Leibniz, the dawn of mathematical logic in the XIXth century, and then the diversification of logic in mathematics, computer science and philosophy in the XXth century. In the second half of the semester we will present relevant modern research areas.

Organization. The course will be organized in Lectures and Colloquia (with invited guest speakers). The grade will be determined by weekly homework (286 points) and written summaries of guest lectures (90 points). Your grade will depend on your total number of points (out of 376). 200 points will be enough to pass the course.

• Homework. There will be 13 homework sets, each worth 22 points. The homework sets are due one week after they are handed out. Homework will be graded by Sara Uckelman. You can either hand it in during the lecture or send it as a PDF file to her by e-mail on or before the day of the deadline.
• Summaries. There will be a number of guest lectures for which you are supposed to write 100-200 word summaries. The deadline for the summaries is one week after the guest lecture. Note that the upper limit of the numbers of words is strict, and points will be deducted for longer summaries. If you are not acquainted with writing summaries, here is a quick guide to writing summaries with a lot of details and links.

  Each summary will be graded on a 0-15 scale for both content and style (15-13: "excellent"; 12-10: "good"; 9-6: "OK"; 5-0: "not OK"). As a consequence, each summary will have between 0 and 30 points. Your three best scores on summaries are added up to give the total summary score out of 90. (Yes, this does mean that you can pick the three guest lectures that you find most interesting.)

  • Grading of content. For this, we shall check your summary against the list of all important points from the lecture, weighted by the order of importance. It is not enough to merely mention a point made, but to embed it into the argumentative structure of the summary, so just dropping names in a parenthetical remark won't be enough. Note that due to the word limit of 200 words, you cannot include all of the important points, so you will have to make a choice.
  • Grading of style. The grade for style is based on the clarity of the thesis statement, your choice of the "red thread", the general set-up of the summary, the argumentative structure of individual sentences, stylistic issues, grammar and spelling. As an indication, you can check the GRE Scoring Guidelines and Samples (check p.27/28 for the scoring guidelines) for essay writing with grades. (As a rough guideline, GRE score 6 would be 'excellent', GRE score 5 between 'excellent' and 'good',GRE score 4 between 'good' and 'OK', GRE score 3 'OK', and GRE score 2 and GRE score 1 'not OK'.) Please keep in mind that the example essays are much longer than the summaries you are supposed to write (the example essays for the good and excellent grades are all more than 400 words long).

Preliminary course syllabus.

Last update: 10 December 2007