Is not philosophy just another term for logic?
Logic is formally recognized in philosophy departments as a branch of philosophy. Philosophy, generically speaking, means "love of wisdom". In essence, it is the study of thinking about thinking. Philosophy covers numerous areas of thinking, such as existence (), knowledge (epistemology), reality (metaphysics, of which ontology – that which exists) is a critical branch), values (ethics), order (logic), critical analysis, mind (consciousness studies), and aesthetics (art). In fact, it is not too farfetched to pre-pend any subject with "the philosophy of", or thinking about one thinks about (fill in the blank). For example, graduate students take courses in the philosophy of history, political philosophy, and the philosophy of science. Philosophy addresses most fundamentally thinking about who we are, what we do, and why we are in this universe.
Logic is regarded in most philosophy department as "setting the standards for the way people reason". However, a more accurate rendition is "the study of order". Logic cannot be equated with many branches of philosophy, such as aesthetics, as the criteria for thinking are different, the former being more precisely structured, and the latter more subjective.
Traditional logic courses cover deductive logic (if the premises are true, so must the conclusion be), and inductive logic (if the premises are true, the conclusion is known only probabilistically. Informal fallacies are considered as attempts to make an argument deductive by introducing specious premises. The former usually is subdivided into propositional logic, quantifier logic, set theory, and mathematical logic. Inductive logic includes scientific methods, statistics, probability, and argumentation by analogy. While logic professors valiantly attempt to symbolize ordinary language with logic, the efforts are deeply flawed, as the translations lack necessary precision. However, a lot can be gained by analyzing argument structures.
A discussion dominates the landscape about whether mathematics "comes before" logic or "after" in terms of one’s ability to describe the other. After years and teaching and writing about logic, I have settled on the view that logic can completely support mathematics, i.e., express every mathematical concept and formula. Going further, it can be argued that logic is the language of innate order in the universe and can express cosmological, as well as quantum structures and systems (http://home.earthlink.net/~jhorne18 ). While logic is not equated with philosophy, it does have the capacity to express many ideas described by other branches of philosophy, such as philosophy of science and metaphysics. And, yes, there is a philosophy of logic, thinking about what the study of logic entails.
I’ll quote one of my philosophy professors from about a thousand years ago: “Philosophy is the search for answers to questions which often have no (definitive) answer(s), but to which some answer(s) must be assumed in order to get on with the business of living.” Logic is but one part of a wide, wide field of fundemental philosophical inquiry.
