Department of History and Philosophy of Science
LOGIC
The new graduate programme “Logic” is the result of a cooperation between the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Research Centre for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens, and the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the National Technical University of Athens.
Logic is the science that studies valid reasoning. More specifically, it studies the rules that ensure that if our reasoning starts from true initial assumptions, then it will lead to true conclusions. Logic has been a branch of Philosophy since antiquity, but since the 19th century it has also become a branch of Mathematics. Nowadays we distinguish between Mathematical Logic and Philosophical Logic, but Philosophical Logic is also developed using largely formal (mathematical) methods.
The graduate programme “Logic” is taught in English and covers both Mathematical and Philosophical Logic. It extends to the use of Logic for providing foundations of Mathematics and to the application of Logic to central branches of Philosophy, such as Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language. It also covers the history of Logic. It is a two-year course and has three specializations:
- History and Philosophy of Logic (M.A.)
- Logic and Foundations of Mathematics (M.Sc.)
- Mathematical Logic (M.Sc.).
The programme will be taught by members of the three collaborating institutions (NKUA, the Academy of Athens, and NTUA), as well as by other distinguished scholars from Greece and abroad.
The programme “Logic” accepts graduates from many Departments and Faculties who are interested in entering the broad, interdisciplinary research field of Logic either for scientific or professional reasons. In particular, the programme “Logic”, on the one hand, prepares those intending to carry out doctoral research in Logic or related branches of Mathematics or Philosophy and, on the other, initiates anyone interested into an understanding of the use and evaluation of arguments. Arguments are encountered in education and research, but also in various forms of private and public life (courts, boards of directors, health science ethics, negotiations, etc.). Thus, knowledge of Logic is useful in all those fields, but also in any other area that requires skills for analytic and synthetic thought.
The new graduate programme has been accredited by the Hellenic Authority for Higher Education and started operating in October 2024.