Trivium Home School · Language Games
The second art of the trivium, taught as Sister Miriam Joseph taught it: from words and terms to propositions, from the syllogism to the fallacies, and from induction to weighing a contested question, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria in the Library of Alexandria, and the English grammar that carries every logical idea.
It picks up where The Art of Grammar leaves off. The section follows the order of Sister Miriam Joseph’s The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (1937), chapters 4 to 10, in our own words and examples. Where modern logic disagrees with traditional logic, the lessons say so. The fallacies, Parts 16 to 19, lead into the rhetoric section, where honest persuasion begins.
What logic is, what a term is, and how we define and divide.
Grammar, logic and rhetoric: three arts of one language, and what logic is for.
Words and terms: one word, several meanings, and the art of noticing the difference.
Aristotle’s ten categories, and the ten questions you can ask about anything.
The more a term says, the fewer things it covers: extension, intension, and a cart of scrolls.
Genus and difference, the rules of definition, and Plato’s featherless chicken.
Dividing a class by one rule at a time, cross-division, and an imaginary encyclopedia.
Sentences that are true or false, and how they are related.
Which sentences can be true or false, and how logic restates them.
All, no, some, some… not: the four propositions, and a basket of figs.
Which terms speak of every member, the five predicables, and smoke and fire.
Contraries, contradictories and subcontraries, and four rumours after a storm.
Turning propositions round and inside out, illicit conversion, and litotes.
From two truths to a third: the syllogism and its relatives.
Three terms, two premises, one conclusion, the rules, and a day off.
The syllogism of rhetoric: missing premises, chains, and a medicine from Cos.
If… then: two valid moves, two fallacies, a lamp without a wick, and Hillel.
Either… or, the dilemma and its escapes, and Protagoras and his student.
Arguments that look valid and are not, and appeals that persuade without proving.
Equivocation, amphiboly, composition, division, accent, and the oracle that tricked Croesus.
Accident, hasty generalisation, false cause, begging the question, and the farmer by the stump.
Missing the point, the straw man, the red herring, and Socrates in a basket.
Ad hominem, ad populum, ad misericordiam and the rest: ethos, pathos and logos corrupted.
Where our first principles come from, and how to weigh a contested question.
From cases to general truths, hypothesis and test, and Eratosthenes measuring the Earth.
Five steps for a disputed question: Thucydides, and the causes of a war.