Logic and Truth

             Logic is the study of necessary truths and of systematic methods for clearly expressing and rigourously demonstrating such truths.
             THERE can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience? In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.
             My new way of viewing an argument is frequently called informal logic, suggesting a contrast with formal logic (the dominant type of logic in western intellectual tradition). But it could also be called communicative logic, or pragmatic logic perhaps, in that it is expressly directed to judging particular aspects of how an argument was used for some communicative purpose, well or badly, in a given case.
             Using Aristotle's system of causal explanation, the 16th-century British philosopher John Rainolds defined emotion as follows: the efficient cause of emotions is God, who implanted them; the material cause is good and evil human things; the formal cause is a commotion of the soul, impelled by the sight of things; and the final cause is seeking good and fleeing evil. The American philosopher L.D. Green's commentary on Rainolds' thesis indicates that Rainolds was not faithful to Aristotle's own discussions of emotion.
             One thing that Aristotle did advocate was moderation of emotions, allowing them to have an effect only at the right time and in the right manner. Rainolds noted that the Aristotelian thinker Cicero saw emotions as ...

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