The second and much more important reason why logic gets a bad press is that it is confused with various things which have nothing to do with it. Consider, for instance, the contrast and the possible conflict between two opposite approaches to politics and to society. On the one side are those who, like Plato (c. 428-c. 348 B.C.E.), want, as he put it in his dialogue The Republic, "to start with a clean canvas." A good example of this approach was provided by the Jacobins during the great French Revolution of 1789. They replaced all the previous subdivisions of France by eighty-three Departments, all roughly equal in area and each with its own administrative center. They also introduced a new calendar of twelve months with freshly minted names, and all the months were divided into three decads of ten days each. (A special arrangement was made to accommodate the surplus five days.) And so on. On the opposite side are those, like Aristotle, who prefer to start from wherever they are, seeing improvement as a matter of natural growth and development. Reformers of the first kind are likely to long for utopia and to have a penchant for wholesale operations. Reformers of the second kind do not expect anything to be perfect and believe that whatever progress can be made has to be made piecemeal. They understand, with the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made."
(Antony Flew, How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning, 2d ed. [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998], 22)
Note from KBJ: I highly recommend this book.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 