Nervous because it looks like the page is getting hacked and in the hopes of making sure I keep these excellent links, I am backing up Joe Carter’s Jesus the Logician project here at the Bible Archive. Mind you this is not the repository for said articles. If you have new submissions you can send them to Joe Carter. It was sparked by Dallas Willard’s article here (with a pdf here). The abstract from said article is as follows with the backup of Joe Carter’s collection from the blogosphere after the jump:
ABSTRACT: In understanding how discipleship to Jesus Christ works, a major issue is how he automatically presents himself to our minds. It is characteristic of most 20th century Christians that he does not automatically come to mind as one of great intellectual power: as Lord of universities and research institutes, of the creative disciplines and scholarship. The Gospel accounts of how he actually worked, however, challenge this intellectually marginal image of him and help us to see him at home in the best of academic and scholarly settings of today, where many of us are called to be his apprentices.
Matthew
Mark
Luke
Logical and Rhetorical Forms Index
Figures of Reasoning
A Fortiori — “To the stronger,” or “even more so. ” We are bound to accept an a fortiori claim because of our prior acceptance of a weaker application of the same reasoning or truth.
Aetiologia — A figure of reasoning by which one attributes a cause for a statement or claim made.
Anthypophora — A figure of reasoning in which one asks and then immediately answers one’s own questions.
Appeal to Evidence
Anacephalaeosis — A recapitulation of the facts.
Apophasis — The rejection of several reasons why a thing should or should not be done and affirming a single one, considered most valid.
Argument from Analogy
Contrarium — Juxtaposing two opposing statements in such a way as to prove the one from the other.
Dirimens copulatio — A figure by which one balances one statement with a contrary, qualifying statement.
Enthymeme — The informal method of reasoning typical of rhetorical discourse. A truncated syllogism.
Expeditio — After enumerating all possibilities by which something could have occurred, the speaker eliminates all but one.
Prosapodosis — Providing a reason for each division of a statement, the reasons usually following the statement in parallel fashion.
Ratiocinatio — Reasoning (typically with oneself) by asking questions.
Reductio ad absurdum — is a type of logical argument where we assume a claim for the sake of argument, arrive at an absurd result, and then conclude the original assumption must have been wrong, since it gave us this absurd result.
Sorites — A chain of claims and reasons which build upon one another. Concatenated enthymemes.
Figures of Ethos
Anamnesis — Calling to memory past matters. More specifically, citing a past author from memory. Anamnesis helps to establish ethos, since it conveys the idea that the speaker is knowledgeable of the received wisdom from the past.