Paradise Logic demonstrates the application of four-stage Miltonic logic as a heuristic apparatus. The model is salient to Paradise Lost as a means to highlight the progression of logic in each of the excerpts, and it reveals the way in which each speaker utilizes this process. The videos underscore the significance of logic in the poem and that the characters’ employment of it represents their affiliation with either infernal, poor logic or divine, pure logic.
.
The videos are divided into sequential investigations, which coordinate to their respective books, and deploy diverse literary praxis on infernal, divine, and human thought processes. Because Milton defined logic as “the art of reasoning well,”[1] the videos illustrate infernal distortion, human misapplication, and divine purity of logic as a mechanism. Milton’s notion of logic was not as an inert force, but a medium by which one may gain “true liberty…which with right Reason dwells.” [2]
—Matt Smith
[1] Reid, Steven J., and Emma Annette. Wilson. Ramus, Pedagogy, and the Liberal
Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011. Print.
[2] Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1935.
Print.
Book I–“That Fixed Mind”: Infernal Logic in Book I of Paradise Lost–Bretton Chatham
Book II–Satan “Volunteers”: Paradise Lost–Emily Donahoe
Book III–Analysis of God’s Speech in Book III–Matt Smith
Book IV–Eve’s First Movements–Allison Wheatley
Book V–A Vain God and the Predestined Fall of Mankind–Emily Pitts
Book VI–Abdiel the “Prophet”–Diamond Forde
Book IX–Eve’s Logic in Book IX: Causation and Moral Agency–D. Geoffrey Emerson
Book XI–The Spatial Fragmentation of Eve–Barry Cole
Book XII–“Eve’s Famous Last Words…”–Shannon Dullard