To take a somewhat outrageous metaphor, the field of logic can be considered the child of two very dissimilar parents. These parents are the disciplines of philosophy and mathematics. They are perhaps the most influential subjects in the entire Western intellectual tradition, but they make an odd couple. One parent is concerned with such imprecise and all-embracing ideas as the existence of God, the nature of art, and the relationship between good and evil. This parent is thoughtful, eclectic, and word-centered, concerned with ethical principles and subjective consequences. The other parent cannot be bothered with the vagaries of emotion or aesthetics; it is cool, precise, and symbol-oriented, concerned with things that can be quantified and measured. Their progeny, logic, is a chip off both blocks: it makes symbolic constructions of philosophical principles. Like all brilliant children, it is a bit confusing at first.The point that philosophy and mathematics share is that both devise and use abstract concepts to describe and understand the material world. It is precisely this point that often gets lost in elementary logic classes. To Jon Barwise, College Professor of Philosophy, Mathematics, and Computer Science at Indiana University-Bloomington, the pedagogical difficulty of teaching beginning logic courses became the launching pad for an innovative use of computer software. In collaboration with John Etchemendy, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, Barwise has developed three software packages that introduce students to the principles of logic. Each software package comes with a textbook and is designed for student use outside class. Barwise sees the courseware as "an intellectual sandbox or erector set where the students can go and explore the topics and work problems. The computer helps them do it efficiently and allows them to do things that you just couldn’t do with a pencil and paper."(Jean Freedman)
