Logic Made Accessible

Read below to learn about the difference between inductive and deductive inferences!

Meet the Team: Director of Outreach, Petru Rosu!

Petru is a rising senior at Columbia University, studying philosophy and mathematics. He has been a part of Logic Made Accessible from the project’s beginning and has helped write the curriculum.

Petru grew up in Bucharest, Romania and loves his weird hometown very much, especially as seen from a bike seat. In his first year of high school, he discovered philosophy and logic through a year-long course at the University of Bucharest. Through LMA now and as a professor after graduate school, he hopes to share his passion for this rich and rewarding field with others. Beyond philosophy, Petru likes playing backgammon on the beach and funk bass in his bedroom.

Meet the Team: Kavin Chada, Outreach Coordinator!

Kavin is studying philosophy and linguistics, and is especially interested in Buddhism and German idealism—which essentially means he wants to interculturalize two philosophical systems from different parts of his heritage.

Long term, he aspires to prove the self is an illusion, and has a 600 day streak of his meditation app. He enjoys writing about himself through personal narrative and fiction, and wanted to be a novelist before he found it necessary to take up philosophy.

He also likes jazz, and plays the trumpet, piano, guitar, drums, and percussion, with diminishing degrees of proficiency.

Meet the Team: Sam Hyman, Outreach Coordinator!

“I am very excited to be a part of this project because I believe that learning philosophy does a lot more than acquaint you with a history of ideas and thinkers. Learning philosophy develops critical thinking toolkits and beneficially skeptical mindsets that allow you to efficaciously navigate politics, society, life, and so much more.

Now, I'd consider myself much less a logician and much more a poststructuralist—i.e., I think all truths are relative in a quintessentially subjective/ideological manner, which is probably a hot take amongst most of my colleagues here—but the fruits and joys of classical philosophy excite me nonetheless.

Some fun facts? I've never been stung by a bee, although I've [accidentally] stung myself with a bee; I may not be fluent in Latin but I am fluent in Pig Latin, the superior tongue; and I'm a big fan of progressive rock (Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, etc).”

Meet the Team: Director of Teaching, Isabel Herburger!

Isabel graduated from Columbia with a major in philosophy this May. She has been working on the Aristotle project over the past year and is currently the leader of the teaching team.

After spending the next year relaxing and backpacking through the Swiss alps, Isabel plans on applying to graduate programs in ethics and moral philosophy. She is especially passionate about the ways that philosophy can be used to drive policy decisions relating to education, social justice, and sustainability.

Meet the Team: Curriculum Developer, Will Kim!

Will Kim is a rising senior at Columbia University, majoring in philosophy. His philosophical interests lie in Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Aesthetics and, on the brief occasion, in Political Philosophy. In the rarer instances he ventures into Metaphysics or Meta-Ethics, he wishes to be a value realist, but finds himself hopelessly drawn to constructivism.

His favorite philosophical ice-breaker in conversation is Grice's conversational maxims, which he will expound upon to anyone who will listen, often breaking several of the maxims in doing so.

In his spare time, he tries hopelessly to catch up with his ever-growing, bloated reading list, find good out-of-the-way restaurants in the NYC area, and pay back his sleep debt.

Meet the Team: Executive Director, Jonathan Tanaka!

Major: Philosophy and Math
Graduation Year: 2023

Jonathan comes from a small pasture-raised egg farm in Kentucky, and credits the time that allowed him to think as to why he became philosophically-inclined.

As our executive director, Jonathan makes sure all of the teams work together well and that Logic Made Accessible accomplishes our mission.

He joined the project because of his love for logic, and his desire for others to have the opportunity to find this passion as well.

Popeye the Sailor was an immensely popular early American cartoon character. His showy gimmick was how his muscles could grow tenfold whenever he ate spinach. In fact, Popeye helped spinach consumption in the U.S. grow by a third! People seem to have drawn the conclusion that “spinach makes your muscles grow.”

Drawing such a conclusion amounts to committing the slanting fallacy, which occurs when a statement excludes relevant pieces of information that are unfavorable to its intents or purposes. While it may be the case that spinach carries an array of advantageous nutrients, there are in reality a lot more factors, practices, and food groups involved in successful muscle growth. Visit aristotelianlogic.com to learn more!

Imagine buying a mixed-berry smoothie and reading the nutrition label. You see ingredients like blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, banana, yogurt, and milk. Sounds like a yummy array, of course. But what’s most appealing is the smoothie’s high percent daily value of calcium. So would it logically follow that all of the ingredients are also high in calcium?

Such a conclusion is an example of a fallacy of division, a fallacy in which the conclusion of an argument unwarrantedly assigns the properties of a whole onto its parts. Just because the smoothie is high in calcium does not mean all of the individual ingredients are too. To learn more, check out aristotelianlogic.com!

New York City is transitioning to rank-choice voting for future elections, and while many residents are excited about the opportunity to try this new voting system, some are apprehensive. While there are some valid arguments concerning the switch, some are clearly invalid. Consider this argument:

Rank choice voting will not work because no one understands the system. No one understands the system because it’s never been used in New York before. So rank choice voting will not work because it’s never been used in New York before.

This argument is fallacious because it forms a vicious circle. Want to learn more? Visit aristotelianlogic.com

You notice that every time there’s a loud thunderstorm in your area, your cat gets scared and hides under the cupboard. You expect that the next time there’ll be a thunderstorm, your cat will get scared and hide under the cupboard again.

This is a very standard example of induction, a form of inference that starts from a bunch of observed particular cases and generalizes to a pattern of behavior for all cases. It’s not foolproof, but it’s very useful – natural science relies heavily on it to get general results based on observation.

If you want to learn more about induction, other ways it’s been thought about, how it can sometimes misfire, or other forms of inference, check us out at aristotelianlogic.com!

Some climate change deniers argue that because climate has naturally changed in the past, it is naturally occurring now, falsely negating the possibility of multiple causes. It is a logical fallacy to argue that by occurring naturally in the past, the particular present occurrence is natural.