Full Professor Vladimir Drekalović, PhD, from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Montenegro gave two guest lectures at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek (20 and 22 May 2026). Both lectures were held for first-year students of the double-major undergraduate study programme in Philosophy as part of the lectures and practical classes for the course Logic.
In the first lecture, he introduced students to the theoretical foundations of natural deduction in propositional logic. He first presented the historical context of the emergence and development of this system of logical reasoning, with particular emphasis on the ideas of the German mathematician Gerhard Gentzen and the Polish logician Stanisław Jaśkowski, after which he introduced students to the basic rules on which the system is based. In doing so, he used the so-called Fitch notation, introduced in the 1930s by the American logician Frederic Brenton Fitch.
In the second lecture, students were given exercises in which they had to apply the rules they had learned. Following one of the fundamental pedagogical principles, he progressed from simpler to more complex exercises, focusing on those requiring the introduction or elimination of conjunction and implication, as well as the introduction of disjunction. Students worked on the exercises independently or in pairs and presented their solutions to the group.
Professor Drekalović presented the material with ease and patiently explained concepts that, due to their highly formalised and therefore abstract nature, are considered particularly demanding both to teach and to master. For this reason, he placed particular emphasis on explaining the practical application of the natural deduction system. I am convinced that all of this contributed to the fact that many students successfully completed the assigned exercises and are now prepared to tackle more demanding types of problems.
Text and photographs:
Hrvoje Potlimbrzović
