James B. Nance
I graduated from Washington State University in 1984 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I had become a Christian during my freshman year, and was interested in overseas missions. While working at the Boeing Company in Seattle, I met and married my lovely wife Giselle. We were planning to serve short term in China, but those plans changed when our first daughter came along. We ended up moving instead to Moscow, Idaho in 1989, where I helped to start a small international church.

During that time I occasionally substitute taught for Doug Wilson at Logos School. It was there that I first heard about classical education, and realized how inadequate my own schooling had been. So I took some evening classes in Logic and Rhetoric that were being offered at New St. Andrews. I had taken a Logic course at WSU, and became increasingly fascinated with each new exposure to it. In 1990 I began teaching math, science and Bible full time at Logos School. That same year the school board decided to move Logic from a one-semester course in tenth grade to a full-year course in eighth grade. I offered and was delighted to receive the opportunity to teach this new class.

Doug Wilson had written and taught from Introductory Logic, and I figured that if the text worked for one semester in tenth grade, I could supplement it a little to fill out the whole year in eighth grade. I was wrong. The eighth graders were so into learning Logic, it quickly became apparent that the text would barely get us through the first semester. I found myself writing the second semester Logic curriculum, lessons which eventually grew into Intermediate Logic. I later extensively rewrote both texts into their current format, and have enjoyed teaching hundreds of students (including my own four children Jamie, Josiah, Jacqueline and Jonathan) from these books.

My goal in these texts is to introduce Logic in a biblical manner, with clear explanations and exercises to help students apply the concepts to arguments and discourse that they will encounter in their daily lives. I want these Logic texts to be a big step toward moving students into young men and women who can think and reason on their own.

Douglas Wilson
I graduated from the University of Idaho in 1977, and went on to get an MA there in philosophy. Because it was a philosophy degree I found myself taking, and enjoying, a course in formal logic there. During the years following, I was involved in building Logos School for my children and because we had committed ourselves to following the Trivium as applied by Dorothy Sayers (which includes Dialectic, or Logic), we decided to teach formal logic in 10th grade. (We later moved the course to the eighth grade to follow Sayers' insight more closely.) I volunteered to teach the course, and over the course of time the materials I developed for the course became the first incarnation of the Introductory Logic text. I commend this line of study for all students because there are far too many people in the world who think that wet streets cause rain.