Ars Logica is a course of study in the art of logic, in which a student can learn logic as a liberal art.
Ars Logica teaches logic as the art of reasoning well. It follows Aristotle and St. Thomas and is arranged by the three acts of the mind.
The first act is simple apprehension. The second act, judgment, covers propositions and how the truth of one relates to that of another, as well as propositions about what is possible and necessary. The third act, reasoning, considers the syllogism especially the proof or demonstration. Students practice drawing conclusions and diagramming syllogisms, study syllogistic form in the abstract and with real terms, and separate an argument’s matter from its form. The course of study of the third act goes on also to consider hypothetical, conjunctive, disjunctive, and modal syllogisms, mixed consequences, the enthymeme, chains of syllogisms, and arguments in ordinary speech.
The course ends with the other uses of reasoning: demonstration, dialectic, rhetoric, and the study of fallacies.
It begins with the opening study, What Is Logic · An Orientation, which the course marks “start here,” and then the First Act of the Mind · Simple Apprehension: the Predicables, the Categories, Division, and Definition. The Second Act (the proposition) and the Third Act (reasoning) follow. The syllogism comes last because it depends on the first two acts.
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