Overview of the Categorical Chapters

Thanks to a generous sabbatical from Lorain County Community College, I have been able to write two new chapters totalling 125 pages on categorical logic for this text.

I have deliberately tried not to be innovative in my treatment of this topic. I began by setting out a “cohort group,” of textbooks 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 cohort group consisted of Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic , Copi et al. Introduction to Logic and Baronett Logic.

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

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.