Philosophy (PHIL) 252

Overview

PHIL 252 is designed to improve a student's ability to analyse and evaluate the kinds of arguments and theories commonly met with in everyday life. The course also helps students improve their own arguments and presentations by showing them how to draw sound conclusions from available evidence and how to construct well-reasoned cases to support these conclusions.

Although the course focuses on the informal logic of everyday language, it includes some training in elementary formal logic. A student is taught how to apply fundamental rules and standards of logical reasoning to the sorts of arguments encountered in newspapers, magazines and other media, and university-level textbooks in most fields.

Outline

Unit 1: Introduction: The Language of Argumentation

Unit 2: Analysing Arguments: Content and Structure

Unit 3: Evaluating Arguments: Validity, Soundness, and Problems of Interpretation

Unit 4: Syllogistic Reasoning

Unit 5: Common Fallacies of Reasoning

Unit 6: Nondeductive Arguments

Unit 7: The Use and Misuse of Statistics

Unit 8: Explanations and Empirical Theories

Unit 9: Conceptual Theories and Definitions

Unit 10: Writing a Short Critical Essay

Evaluation

To receive credit for PHIL 252, you must submit every piece of written work and achieve a course composite grade of at least “D” (50 percent). The weighting of the composite grade is as follows:

Tutor-marked Exercise	Mid-term Test	Short Critical Essays	Final Exam	Total
15%	20%	25%	40%	100%

To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University's online Calendar.