Friday, December 19, 2014

What I did with my sabbatical

These 125 pages represent the bulk of my creative output this sabbatical. They are a part of a larger project to create a free, open access logic textbook that would be competitive with Hurley's A Concise Introduction to Logic ($152.90, new), Copi et al. Introduction to Logic ($144.24, new) and Baronett Logic ($84.30, new). My hope is to combine my own writing with existing texts by Cathal Woods and P.D. Magnus to create a text that can match the coverage of these expensive books. The resulting book An Open Introduction to Logic will available for teachers through the same outlets they are used to using, to make widespread adoption as easy as possible.

This sabbatical's output is just the section on Aristotelian logic. I haven't tried to be particularly innovative. I took the books by Hurley, Cohen et al., and Baronett to be my "cohort group," and surveyed them to determine what instructors were doing, and to establish that none of the methods here were anyone's intellectual property. I wanted to be sure that everything is just standard industry practice, so to speak. The table below shows how many pages our book and the texts in the cohort group to the two major topics covered, categorical statements and categorical syllogisms. More importantly, it shows the number of exercises the texts gives for each topic. Basically, my page count is in the same range as the cohort group, but I have 100 more exercises than even Hurley's book, which has a hell of a lot of exercises. Page totals do not include glossaries, bibliographies, etc.

Categorical Statements Categorical Syllogisms Total
Hurley 64 pages, 318 exercises. 52 pages, 107 exercises 116 pages, 425 exercises
Baronett 52 pages, 243 exercises. 70 pages, 188 exercises 122 pages, 431 exercises
Copi et al.: 41 pages, 130 exercises. 82 pages, 231 exercises 123 pages, 361 exercises
Loftis et al.: 44 pages, 274 exercises 69 pages, 297 exercises 113 pages, 571 exercises

The excerpts I posted will be chapters 10 and 11 of the final text. They appear as chapters 1 and 2 because I didn't compile the full textbook. Also, all cross references to chapters not in this compilation of the text will appear as question marks. The glossary, bibliography, and table of contents only covers these two chapters

These are my authors notes on my Chapter 10 and Chapter 11..

These documents compare the coverage of texts in the cohort group for categorical statements and categorical syllogisms.

5 comments:

Perl Hacker said...

What an excellent project. I wonder if it could be linked as a resource at the non-profit Khan Academy? There are plenty of math and science courses on offer there but none in basic logic. Best of luck!

Regards,
Perl Hacker

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

I'd love to partner with Khan Academy. But one thing at a time: I still need to finish the book.

themusicgod1 said...

Link appears to be broken? Whatever happened to this project?

themusicgod1 said...

Looks like this the link to the 124 page document is broken, whatever happened to this project? Is it available anywhere?

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

It is all available here.

http://forallxremix.org/