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Friday, November 12, 2010

Featured: Philosophy; Fallacies and Paradoxes

We currently have 37 recorded courses available through our Subscription Service and we are adding more each month. We are featuring a different recorded course each week to help you learn more about our offerings.

Philosophy: Fallacies and Paradoxes

Total classes: 6
Duration: approx. 75 minutes each
Professor: Jean Rioux, Ph.D.

Course description: This six-class course is devoted to learning about, and identifying, examples of flawed reasoning. Analyzing paradoxes, and their solutions, helps us better to understand the nature of human reasoning itself, and how best to assure that we arrive at the truth (and not falsity) through its use.

Week-by-week outline:
Class One: Linguistic Fallacies and Formal Non-Linguistic Fallacies (theory)
Class Two: Linguistic Fallacies and Formal Non-Linguistic Fallacies (application)
Class Three: Formal Non-Linguistic Fallacies and Material Non-Linguistic Fallacies (theory)
Class Four: Formal Non-Linguistic Fallacies and Material Non-Linguistic Fallacies (application)
Class Five: Logical Paradoxes (examples)
Class Six: Logical Paradoxes (resolutions and implications)

The "theory" classes would be devoted to laying out what fallacies there are and why they are fallacies; the "application" classes would consist of going over lots of examples, and asking students to classify the fallacies on the basis of distinctions already made.

Homework: There is no written homework for this course. However, there is assigned reading.

Course materials: The text is provided free of charge by Dr. Rioux.

High school credit: This course is worth 1/2 semester credit. Dr. Gotcher's course Introduction to Logic (also recorded) is the perfect companion to this course and the two together would make up a full semester credit.

Professor's biography: Dr. Rioux is a professor and chair of the philosophy department at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where he has taught for twenty-three years. A graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, he completed his graduate work in philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies in Houston, earning the M.A. in 1984 and the Ph.D. in 1990. Specializing in the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Rioux has published textbooks in logic and natural philosophy, as well as articles on the philosophy of mathematics in the Thomist and the Aquinas Review. He came to Benedictine with a love for the study of primary texts, as well as a keen interest in what computers might bring to that study. His contributions to the philosophical life of Benedictine College range from Great Books Sequences in philosophy and theology to 3D software for students of logic. He and his wife, Maria, raise their nine children in a farmhouse in rural Kansas. They have been designing their own curricula and educating their children at home for over twenty years.

Course Access:
Available 24/7 for as long as you are a subscriber so you may learn at your own pace on your own time.

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