“It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.” – Sophocles
“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech” – Martin Farquhar Tupper
“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.” – Dionysus of Halicarnassus
Monthly Archives: June 2015
God cares how we define
In light of the recent Supreme Court travesty, I thought it was worthwhile revisiting this short clip from my logic video course.
Commonplaces #1
In anticipation of my soon-to-be-published rhetoric text, Fitting Words, I have decided to post each Monday my favorite commonplaces, scrounged and solicited over the past twenty years of teaching rhetoric. Each post will include two or three quotes on a given topic.
It is fitting that the topic of this first post be commonplaces about commonplaces.
“I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.” – Dorothy Sayers
“If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour.” – Dianna Booker
“Un bon mot ne prouve rien.” [“A witty saying proves nothing”] – Voltaire
RR @ CHEC & OCEAN
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The Roman Roads Media team will have booths at both the CHEC conference in Denver this Thursday through Saturday, June 18-20, and the OCEAN conference in Portland this Friday and Saturday, June 19-20.
If you are attending either conference, stop on by the Roman Roads booth. We would enjoy visiting with you!
Stoic Logic
Many of the teachings of the ancient Stoics were nearly identical to those of modern propositional logic. For example, Philo of Megara (fl. 300 BC) said that a conditional is false if it has a true antecedent and a false consequent; in all other cases it is true. Diodorus (died 284 BC) taught that a conditional is true if and only if it neither is nor was possible for the antecedent to be true and the consequent false.
Is that cool or what?
A Tragic Hero
The change in the hero’s fortune must be…from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part
Aristotle, Poetics
Incarnation Deduction
The Westminster Confession of Faith declares the value of logic for understanding truth, saying, “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.” The truth that Jesus is God is set down in John 1:1, 8:58, Titus 2:13, and Hebrews 1:8, as is the truth that Jesus is Man, in John 8:40, Acts 2:22, and Hebrews 2:14.
But the truth that Jesus is both God and Man is deduced “by good and necessary consequence” from those statements set down expressly, by a rule of inference called conjunction (we know P, we know Q, therefore we know P and Q). This may sound obvious enough, but the nature of that conjunction (eg. was Jesus one Person in two natures, divine and human, or only of or from two natures?) took several centuries for the church to apprehend and set down in creeds, such as the Definition of Chalcedon.