ASU - The Logic Man

When you choose Philosophy as a major the most frequent question you get, especially from your parents, is, "What are you going to do with it?" I had no idea at the time -- though as it turned out Philosophy did actually lead me to a career of sorts. I enjoyed a class called Principles of Sound Reasoning which might have been called Rhetoric in an earlier generation. So I moved on to Symbolic Logic which was taught by Dr. C____ whose book was our text. Dr. C____ was one of the best teachers I had in school, not because he was an entertaining lecturer but because he knew his subject so well that he could translate our inarticulate questions into much more interesting and profound ones, and then tell us he would have to think about it until next class before giving us an answer. Instead of feeling like recipients of learning we felt like part of a team actively discovering knowledge for the first time.

After my junior year I grew disgusted with academic philosophy and decided to drop out of school. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything else clever to do so at the last minute I jumped back into school. I was too late to sign-up for most classes so I went to all my favorite professors and begged them to squeeze me into their classes. It was a strange mix of classes I took that semester and the strangest may have been Dr. C____'s Aesthetics class. He had never taught it before and I don't recall now if it was his idea or something the department wanted to offer and volunteered him to teach.

Aesthetics turned out to be very interesting and surprisingly close to his expertise. To take the simplest question as an example: What does a painting (or any work of art) mean? The obvious answer is that it means what the artist intended it to mean -- provided the artist will divulge that information. But the Dionysian theory of artistic creation has the artist as a sort of passive instrument through which the gods speak, or in this case create. So maybe the artist isn't the one to ask after all. Suppose everybody in one century thinks a work of art means one thing but a few centuries later everyone agrees it means something else? Is one group wrong or can the meaning change over time? Is it even possible for a work of art to mean the same thing to people of different cultural backgrounds or different eras? This might not be symbolic but it certainly involves logic.

Dr. C____ and I became friends and for years I used a darkroom enlarger I borrowed from him before returning it when I moved to California. Of all my professors the one I most regret losing touch with is Dr. C____. 

Boolean Algebra was my favorite part of his Symbolic Logic class and is also the foundation of computer languages like BASIC. Years after graduating from ASU I bought my first computer, a tiny Timex-Sinclair ZX81, to play with Boolean Algebra and then made my living programming for over a decade.