Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

The Compleate Logician, or Miss Blackmore’s Unspeakable Sin

Mike Alder asks what is wrong with being charmingly illogical.

Aseries of science/fantasy novels by Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague deCamp started in the nineteen forties, and were collected later in The Incompleate Enchanter. They featured Harold Shea, who travelled into the world of Norse Myth, and subsequently into other fictional worlds, including Spenser’s Faery Queen and the Finnish epic the Kalevala. This was accomplished by the syllogismobile: it consisted of reciting and focussing the mind on the underlying logical premises of these worlds. While it made entertaining fantasy, even in my early teens I was sceptical of the efficacy of a syllogismobile, although it did turn my adolescent mind to the question of logic. Other SF books with a related element were the Null-A books of A.

…