Overhead slides for Lectures 1 to 16

These are the overheads for my lectures for first year philosophers in Cambridge, as given in the Michaelmas term 2010.

For the first three lectures, the PDFs are “static”, i.e. the bullet points appear all-at-once on a page. But after that, they are “dynamic”, revealing one bullet point at a time (because there is often over-writing, or the dynamic filling-in of truth-tables etc.). For the best effect, select “View > Page Display  > Single Page” in Adobe Reader.

The overheads were there to help speed things up, rescue students from having to read too much of my terrible blackboard writing, and to keep me on message. Needless to say, I embroidered around and about them in the live show, and threw in other remarks as the mood, wrote on a side board, as the spirit moved. So the content of the overheads is intentional pretty basic and conventional. Don’t expect wild excitements! But for what they are worth, here they are:

  1. Introduction 1: The Business of Logic
  2. Introduction 2: The Counterexample Technique
  3. Introduction 3: Proofs; Divide and Rule
  4. Basic Propositional Logic 1: Three Connectives
  5. Basic Propositional Logic 2: Bivalence; Evaluating Propositions
  6. Basic Propositional Logic 3: How to Test Arguments, a Sketch; Introducing PL
  7. Basic Propositional Logic 4: Tautologies
  8. Basic Propositional Logic 5: Tautological Entailment
  9. Basic Propositional Logic 6: The Material Conditional
  10. Basic Propositional Logic 7: ‘Only if’; The Expressive Adequacy Theorem
  11. Trees for Propositional Logic 1: Signed trees introduced
  12. (& 13) Trees for Propositional Logic 2 & 3: Unsigned trees

The overheads for the three lectures on trees seem particularly sparse: I did a lot of talking through the ideas as we went along in the lectures. [And I finished lecture 13 with an mini-lecture on the efficiency of truth-table and truth-tree method for testing arguments, which are in the worst cases, exponentially costly — which led to a brief gesture at the P vs NP problem.]

  1. Introducing QL 1: Basics, and how not to treat quantifiers
  2. Introducing QL 2: The quantifier/variable treatment of generality
  3. Introducing QL 3: More examples

The lectures continue into the Lent term, following the book in introducing quantifier trees, expanding the language QL to include identity, explaining tree rules for identity, and finishing with something on the theory of descriptions.

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