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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Socrates, Plato , and Aristotle teach you Critical Reasoning, December 23, 2003
This review is from: Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (Hardcover)
Wonderful! I have been waiting for this book to arrive for sometime - I finally got it! The last time books on Aristotelian logic were written was about 40 years ago. Demand for these books diminished because courses in symbolic logic became the norm in universities. I believe David Kelley's book, The Art of Reasoning, is similar in content, but nevertheless differs from Socratic Logic in several key ways. Utilizing the wisdom from the ancients, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Socratic Logic teaches you how to reason effectively in ordinary language from the beginning and continues the approach throughout the whole book. The material found in this book is sorely missing in these informal logic, or critical thinking books and college courses today. The hallmark of these is to study a few fallacies and decipher their presence in articles, debates, literature, etc., with very little explanation of how these arguments are fallacious. ("Why" they are fallacious is discussed, but not "how".) Only a firm grounding in Aristotelian logic can teach you "how". For modern critical thinkers, one of the strengths of this book (there are many) is the chapter on "Material Fallacies". Professor Kreeft includes the formal fallacies as well. He goes through 49 fallacies categorized in an intuitive order and presents them in a "commonsensical" manner- to use Professor Kreeft's word. Now, symbolic logic is good. However, it just has to be appreciated within its proper context. Symbolic logic is a robust tool for in-depth linguistic analyses and the sciences. In contrast, Aristotelian logic is for the humanities. The author makes an excellent distinction in "Section 3: The two logics". So, if you hear some refer to Aristotle's logic as "basic logic", this may be true with respect to the sciences, but not true with respect to everyday conversation, reading, writing, debate, persuasion, presentation, etc. - all of the skills needed to be an educated person in society. No one (and this is not a knock on symbolic logic) converses with, "If p then q . . ." Symbolic logic certainly does help you on paper for in-depth analysis, but the goal is different and this difference is never stately clearly enough in the college classroom. A frequent criticism you hear about symbolic logic is that it doesn't take into account the "material" or essences of the subjects and predicates in propositions. It just focuses on forms of reasoning. Both are important and this book will provide a firm foundation for learning symbolic logic. Lastly, for a logic text book, the price is not exorbitant. It is worth buying if you want to study the ancient foundations of critical reasoning!
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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From the Editor, January 15, 2004
This review is from: Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (Hardcover)
Hi folks, thanks for the great reviews and suggestions. As with any 1st edition textbook, there are still many glitches I'm sure. It didn't take me long to find a few post-production typos. In an effort to better serve you, I'll be posting corrections at www.Trent.Dougherty.net/Socratic_Logic.htm We hope that you will benefit from this modern exposition of ancient wisdom!
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Book for Thinkers of All Ages, December 31, 2003
This review is from: Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (Hardcover)
Fantastic! Along with Adler's "How to Read a Book" (which is briefly summarized in Kreeft's book), it is the book I most wish I had been able to read when young enough to profit most fully from it. But no one is too old for this book. One of the most enjoyable features of this book is the way it skewers modern logic, sometimes allowing it to skewer itself. Worth its price even for that alone. The author does concede value to modern logic in its place. This book shows both the practical and philosophic sides of logic (if there's a difference). According to an old proverb, repetition is the mother of learning. This book repeats all the key points so often that the reader could hardly avoid learning them. An answer key provides the answers to the even-numbered exercises of most sets, facilitating self-study. The exercises themselves range over a wide variety of ideas. A minor matter: Kreeft's version of Barbara Celarent is not couched in dactylic hexameter like the version presented in Sister Miriam Joseph's book "The Trivium". The latter book covers not only logic but grammar and rhetoric as well, in a shorter space, hence is neither as clear nor as comprehensive a treatment of logic as Kreeft's book, but just as entertaining. If you like a stereoscopic view of things consider her book alongside Kreeft's. The publishers on the whole have succeeded in producing a handsome volume, but there are many annoying glitches, some of which could have been found with a spell checker. Confusion may arise from the misspelling of "gaol" and of the Latin words "nomina" and "affirmo". It appears to me (a former mathematician) that the author uses the term "zero-sum" in a non-idiomatic manner. And surely, when the author recommends reading all of Plato's works up to the Republic, it wouldn't have taken much space to list them. The most serious drawback is the absence of an adequate index. Whether you use this book as a textbook or just for your own enjoyment, I recommend you make your own index as you go along. The section "Logic and Theology" begins: "In principle, what could possibly be a more important application of logic than its application to the ulitmate question, the question about ultimate reality?" Five sections later: "Ethics is the most important part of philosophy." I leave it up to you to decide whether there's any contradiction here, or whether I'm just quoting out of context, equivocating, or committing one of the other fallacies in this book's long list. But I predict you'll be profiting from this book long after you've forgotten the details of most of your college texts.
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