1 Some Topics on Teaching Logic

Ideally, a well-educated person must know many things about logic: from propositional calculus to fallacies, through syllogisms and their history. Those among us who make a living teaching logic to high school and college students may have a hard time trying to meet all these requirements, given the limited amount of time and the abundance of teaching materials available. I propose to simplify our work by trying to teach logic as a technique based on argumentative devices, something like Cicero’s Topics. This approach allows us to give cohesion to the syllabus, to illuminate its contents with the practice, and to prepare the student for more advanced courses. In this paper, I will present some considerations to defend my proposal without discussing the details of the implementation. Logic as teaching topics In a document that can be considered as programmatic for the Workshop for Teaching Logic, at the National University of Mexico, Alejandro Herrera and his colleagues have outlined some of the goals of a formal education in logic that have to be covered by the training programs (Herrera et al. 1998). In two following articles, Raymundo Morado has specified a little better these goals (Morado 1999) and has indicated some places to fin