Karen Lewis

I think that this course is a great end to anyone's study of philosophy, regardless of the subspecialties within philosophy that they may be most interested in. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Spring 2021 Course: PHILUN3912_018_2021_1-SEMINAR : PHILUN3912_018_2021_1 - SEMINAR Instructor: Achille Varzi

The workload was fair, readings for each class (which we quickly fell behind on), 4 essays per semester, and the occasional in class activity.

I was very hopeful upon entering this class as I had been recommended this class by friends, however, this class turned out to be one of the most boring classes I have taken at Columbia. And as my first philosophy course it left me with a distaste of the discipline. The style of lecture was often so boring that I often fought sleep off. While the content itself might be interesting, I often struggled to know follow along in class as we often were sidetracked by Professor Lewis' tangents and when answering questions she would rarely repeat the question, answering without context leaving me confused.

If you can't afford a tutor, don't take Intro to Logic with Karen Lewis. Just don't.

10% - Attendance and in-class exercise participation 15% - 10 reading responses over the course of the semester 75% - 3 papers, 2000 words each

Decent. Weekly homework sets that start out easy and then get very difficult. 1-4 hours a week.

This course is not one for the faint of heart, but if you care about the subject matter it will be very rewarding in the end. If your interest is in language in general and not analytic philosophy, then a critical theory or linguistics course might be more enjoyable. If you're a philosophy major, this course moves quickly enough that it may well be one of the more difficult ways to satisfy your analytic requirement. That said, if you are interested in learning a variety of analytic frameworks with which to model the workings of human language, then this is the course for you! The first unit is on pragmatics, and is definitely the easiest of the three units to understand. We started with speech act theory, then looked at some of its applications in feminist philosophy, and ended with conversational implicature and context sets. It's best to get a bunch of the reading responses out of the way in this unit since the material gets harder later on. The next unit is on semantics, with a focus on reference and the way names work. This unit has the fewest readings but they are all very dense. We read Frege's model of sense and reference, Russell's theory of descriptions, Kripke's critique of cluster descriptivism, and Graff Fara's defense of predicativism. The final unit is on meaning and truth, and some of the readings here are very difficult to understand without a background in log…

Read some mixed reviews of Prof. Lewis for her Intro to Philosophy course. Decided to take Intro to Logic with her. Huge mistake. This must have been her first time teaching Intro to Logic and it showed. She wasn't confident in the material at all. There were times when she froze up trying to answer questions in a way that had the whole class cringing. The material is easy at first so you're able to get through her poorly made and confusing lectures without any consequence but after the first test it gets significantly harder. She plodded through an ocean of confused faces and delivered her powerpoint presentations just the same. Don't take this class with her unless you are naturally gifted at understanding math. My gut feeling is that she won't be teaching it again anyway.