Part I is focused on Arguments and Reasoning

This course is a step-by-step guide to building knowledge that is primarily taught in philosophy departments. A central part of philosophical writing and discussion is the effort toward the reasoned persuasion of an audience or philosophical reasoning. A corresponding goal for students of this course is learning to interpret, evaluate, and engage in such argumentation.

The knowledge and skills provided in this course will benefit students in many ways and at a personal, social and professional level. Students will also find that the same skills underlie successful reading and writing and enhance the ability to persuade others through the use of careful argumentation. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which these skills will serve students in life after the course: the need to think clearly and reason well does not go away and is something that affects not only the way you think but also the way you interact with others.

Besides, critical thinking informed by philosophy is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. A critical thinker is able to deduce consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems and to seek relevant sources of information to inform himself. Not only this but also critical thinking skills can be used in exposing fallacies and bad reasoning.

This course is complementary to the course "Logic at the Workplace" and is mainly focused on reasoning that is informed from philosophy, rather than the application of the reasoning to practical situations as provided in the "Logic at the Workplace".

This course describes and analyzes the structure of the basic atoms of reasoning, namely arguments. Arguments are the basic building blocks of reasoning and those who understand their structure acquire the strong argumentative and critical skills that help them not only to build strong arguments in order to persuade others but also acquire enhanced critical skills to assess what arguments are good and what arguments are bad what are strong and what are weak, in the plethora of information that we receive every day from our environment and social media.

We will gradually explore the structure of reasoning: we will see what are arguments, in what they consist in; what is validity and soundness with respect to the premises and conclusions of an argument; we will mention ways to spot faulty invalid inferences and fallacies through examples and build step by step argumentative and critical skills in order to easily spot invalid and unsound arguments during not only on daily conversations but also on serious political, scientific, etc., information that we receive every day in our lives.