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Lewis Carroll Puzzles (hawaii.edu)
58 points by logicbundle on April 25, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



I own an anthology that these come from, it is really a cool book. Modern logic classes typically try to find a very organized way of getting from basic to advanced logic in a very orderly way, partly because there isn't nearly enough time to cover even a fraction of the material, but that ignores a lot of the rich historical roots and traditions in logic that are deeply intermixed with philosophy. It is something of a tradition for logic books to use problems from Lewis Carroll's works in enthymemes and sorites problems. There is a depth of discussion about a lot of things that make you think deeply about assumptions in how we think about the world. Carroll also goes into things like visual diagrams for solving different types of problems (almost like a Domain Specific Language visually for logic problems), problems that are interesting in themselves, puns, word problems, etc. It really reflects a very interesting intellect that was skilled in both mathematics, logic, photography, and literary accomplishments. His letters are fun to read as well; he wrote a _lot_ of them.


The rabbit hole is deep for this one. There are gems on the wiki page for Enthymemes [0]

> In the examples, 'having a cough' and 'having a child' are signs of illness and giving birth respectively. In both cases the enthymeme is only probably true because there are other sources of coughs and children besides pathogens and parturition respectively

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme




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