“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org has a post on his current semester’s “teaching”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/11/teaching_teaching_teaching/. He reports there on an advanced undergraduate logic course he is teaching, where he is using an interesting sounding textbook:

bq. I’ve decided to follow Graham Priest’s book “An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052179434X/geeknotes-20/102-9642575-6972917 rather closely, which means I don’t need to make too many further decisions. (It’s designed to fit into an Australian academic semester, and to follow an intro logic course just like mine.) The book doesn’t take quite the line I’d follow, but it’s much better than a merely “good enough” book that I’d use through gritted teeth. […]
Graham structures the course around the search for a good semantics for the conditional of natural language. I think that that question is both easier (for many purposes – think of mathematical reasoning – the “material conditional” is just fine and dandy, thank you very much) and more difficult (there’s all sorts of context sensitivity in conditional constructions which a sensible look at would take you very very far away from a second-level undergraduate course) than Graham concedes, so I don’t get as much out of the central theme as Graham does.

I think the idea of Priest’s book is intriguing. In our regular teaching rotation, I am scheduled to teach our undergraduate introduction to semantics and pragmatics next spring. In previous years, I have tried to use various textbooks on the market (Chierchia & Mc-Connell-Ginet, Heim & Kratzer, de Swart), supplemented with my own notes, but I was never satisfied with the classes.

Since I am supposedly busy writing a monograph on conditionals, maybe it would be an interesting spin-off project to create an introduction to semantics and pragmatics centered around the search for an adequate analysis of the meaning of natural language conditionals. (I’ll have to think about copyright issues, because for anything like a textbook I would want to retain the right to have an annually revised version available online for free, even if the book is also distributed commercially by some publisher or other). I suppose Priest has a moral patent on the idea, but I hereby declare a derivative patent for an undergraduate semantics course centered around conditionals.