Ian Hacking of the University of Toronto Department of Philosophy delivers this year’s Richard & Dorothy Sikora Lecture entitled “On Logic” on Friday, November 2, 3:00-5:00 in Irving Barber Learning Centre, Victoria Learning Theatre 182.
Peirce defined logic as 3-headed: deductive, inductive, and abductive. Inductive logic, properly understood, was invented in the 17th century. Deductive logic was invented by Aristotle. Before he had discovered the syllogism, he lectured on dialectic and on rhetoric. These teach not how to preserve truth or make the best decision, but how to convince people. They are what Sperber and Mercer recently analysed in series of papers, notably one in Behavioural & Brain Sciences, 2011. They present argument as a human universal. This talk studies how, in antiquity, but also in the early modern period, argument was devalued in the face of logic.
