being of truth—is logic’s most basic concern, but only when logic has the will to be a searching, scientific logic—a logic that philosophizes.
§3. A philosophizing logic and traditional scholastic logic
But if logic is, by definition, a discipline within philosophy, is there really any kind of logic other than philosophical logic? There certainly is. The kind of logic that is and was commonly taught in the universities of today and of yesteryear is a logic that has given up on any kind of philosophy, that is, any kind of serious questioning and investigation. This so-called “scholastic logic” is not philosophy, and it is not any one of the particular sciences. It is a form of sloth, kept alive by custom and by off-the-record academic arrangements and desires. It is also a fraud.
Scholastic logic is a form of sloth tailor-made for instructors. All they have to do, year after year, is parrot the same old stock of unchanging, shopworn propositions, formulas, rules, and definitions. Variations in how these logic courses are taught is confined to how the teacher packages it, how thorough he is, and what kind of examples he chooses. In this kind of “logic,” the logician never runs a risk, never has to put up or shut up—which is the price that you have to pay to do real philosophy.
It is a fraud perpetrated on the students. They are trapped for a whole semester studying stuff of utterly dubious value. It would be easier and more expeditious for them—not to mention quicker and cheaper—to just read the stuff on their own in any logic manual.
This kind of scholastic logic can certainly appeal to a long tradition of teaching that reaches back through the Middle Ages [13] to the time when logic was originally established as a discipline (see above). But even the most ancient of traditions cannot claim its own legitimacy when it began as a result of a decline, or better, began as a decline.
Traditional scholastic logic comes from a period when philosophy had already lost its character as a productive force. The fact that later, creative philosophers have since taken this logic under their wings changes nothing basic. Traditional scholastic logic retains the content (but trivialized, uprooted, and mummified) of an original philosophical questioning that was alive in Plato and Aristotle but got completely stifled and rigidified by the schools.
The endless retailing of this over-the-counter stock of scholastic logic is an outrage to real philosophizing. It is beneath the dignity of the university as a place of questioning and searching.
Our decision for a philosophizing logic, our repudiation of the collegium logicum in its traditional form, is neither some rash rejection of the tradition, nor is it a supercilious disdain for solid learning, for getting an academic position, and even less so for the university. Quite