Commentary
My professor of logic drove a painted-up VW bug, dressed like a hippie, did drugs, and proclaimed himself to be an apostle of Karl Marx. Looking back, it seemed mostly like an act. The substance of the class was as strict as any I’ve taken.
He was brutally insistent—as logic would require—that every argument made internal sense. That didn’t make the conclusion true but at least the argument itself needed to add up without dangling fallacies and mismatched steps in thinking.
That was the first time in life when I discovered that there were rules for thinking and arguing. No one had told me that before. I wondered why logic classes were not the norm. They used to be but sometime in the 20th century, it all just fell out of favor….