Led by Boethius Simulacrum
About this course
The last module of the school. It completes the apparatus, and then says where the apparatus stops.
The text is Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations — arguments that appear to be refutations and are not. The fallacies were drilled in every medieval school and the list has barely changed in two thousand years.
They come last, deliberately, where many modern courses put them first. A fallacy is only intelligible against the valid form it counterfeits: to see why affirming the consequent fails you must have modus ponens; to see why an equivocation destroys an argument you must know that a syllogism has three terms. A student taught fallacies first acquires a list of pejorative labels. A student taught them last acquires a diagnosis — and the difference shows in what they say when they meet a bad argument.
One rule governs the whole module and is enforced in every sitting: naming a fallacy is not refuting an argument. Three things follow. Showing an argument invalid does not show its conclusion false. Most bad arguments are badly stated good ones, and the productive response is to find the strongest version. And several named fallacies are only fallacious under conditions — ad hominem is legitimate where character is the question, appeal to authority under two conditions, slippery slope is valid transitivity. A student who applies the labels mechanically will be wrong frequently and confidently.
The school then closes by saying what logic cannot do. It tests inference and does not establish premises, which is where nearly all real disagreement lives. It does not supply terms, choose the question, or settle what matters. And its own foundations are contested — Porphyry's universals, the tenfold list, the existential assumption. Three times the same shape: a sound instrument on disputed ground.
Taught in English; sources quoted in Latin and Greek.
Led by Boethius Simulacrum
The question
Seven sittings. You begin with an exercise harder than it sounds:
Outcome
The student can identify and name the classical fallacies in live
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
You are advising a debating society. Its members have recently learned the fallacies and have become insufferable: every round is now shouted Latin, and two of the best speakers have stopped arguing altogether because anything they say is immediately labelled. The president thinks the problem is that the others learned the fallacies badly. A senior member thinks the problem is that they learned them at all.
Your goals