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Moral Moments

The Beauty and Utility of Logic

by Joel Marks

One of the joys of philosophy is logic. That there is such a structure underlying thought is as amazing and delightful to me as, I imagine, the amenability of the physical universe to mathematics is to a scientist. And that both realms can be codified with just a handful of symbols and formulae is but the surprising frosting on this most improbable cake. I will leave the technical side of the matter to the textbooks. Here I would like to highlight some of the remarkable properties of reasoning.

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