A logic teacher’s blues

Despite my effort, it is not easy to enthuse students for this subject. Philosophy is often depicted in popular culture as a branch of literature, in which mysterious thinkers reel off deep wisdoms. Many people have this image of philosophy when they commence their studies and they are unpleasantly surprised when they have to sit exams in mathematical logic. During lectures on natural deduction and probability, they look as if they were dizzy. One student of mine wrote to me on her homework: ‘I don’t understand anything, soz pops.’ I know that I’m only three years older, but anyway. It’s shocking where today’s youth is going!

Some people claim that logic is useless. A friend of mine who studies literature told me recently: ‘You philosophers are narrow-minded, because you emphasise logic too much and you miss the really important things.’ I don’t get this. I know that Nietzsche considered logic to be a virtue of the weak, that the feminist Andrea Nye regarded it as a tool of patriarchy, and that many others dismissed it as ideological. Unfortunately, these people didn’t understand that logic is a part and parcel of every thought and that thinking without logic doesn’t exist. As Frege said, if we found a man who didn’t follow our laws logic, we would discover a hitherto unknown type of madness. To study logic is important for everyone, not just philosophers.

Like all logic teachers, I try to make logic more interesting by enriching tedious mathematical structures with juicy examples. My former professor was the best at this – whether his lecture was on proofs or relations, he always managed to smuggle in some left-wing criticism of British government. However, juicy examples could also lead to controversies. One of our logic professors has long been refusing to remove an exercise from his worksheet which assumed that marriages can only be mixed. He has been facing vigorous criticism from both students and his colleagues for many years. I also remember that the same professor tried to convince us that from a logical point of view, gender is binary, despite the fact that one of our classmates was genderqueer.

Logic generally attracts people of a rather specific kind. I have never met a more peculiar guy than my current logic supervisor. He never asks me how I am and starts every lesson with a sentence like ‘your interpretation of Frege is wrong’. He definitely doesn’t stand on civilities. His supervisions are long lines of vigorous intellectual attacks on my essays. The professor is also known for spending his weekends by tracing the footsteps of Wittgenstein, applying the rules of intuitionistic logic to cricket and dwelling frantically on cleanliness. I wonder if I will turn out to be a similar kind of guy one day.