“What is logic and what is it good for?”: Reasons to Study Logic—Part 1

1. Order. You may be wondering, “What can I do with logic?” The answer is that logic can do something with you. Logic builds the mental habit of thinking in an orderly way. A course in logic will do this for you even if you forget every detail in it (which you won’t, by the way), just as learning Latin will make you more habitually aware of the structure of language even if you forget every particular Latin word and rule.

No course is more practical than logic, for no matter what you are thinking about, you are thinking, and logic orders and clarifies your thinking. No matter what your thought’s content, it will be clearer when it has a logical form. The principles of thinking logically can be applied to all thinking and to every field.

Logic studies the forms or structures of thought. Thought has form and structure too, just as the material universe does. Thought is not like a blank screen, that receives its form only from the world that appears on it, as a movie screen receives a movie.  A study of logic will show you the basic forms (structures) and the basic laws (rules) of thought, just a a course in physics or chemistry shows you the basic forms and laws of matter. [Adapted from Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic]