Aristotelian logic

“ This one-sided view of Logic has been embraced and perpetuated by the Aristotelian expositors, who have carefully illustrated, and to a certain extent even amplified, the part which was already in comparative excess, while they have added nothing to the part that was in defect, and have scarcely even preserved Aristotle’s recognition of it as being not merely legitimate but essential. The vast body of Inductive Science, accumulated during the last three centuries, has thus, until recently, been allowed to grow up, as if its proofs and processes had nothing to do with Logic. ”

“ The way in which logical doctrine is developed in the Aristotelian treatises fits in with this view. Doubtless what we have is in the main a reflex of the heuristic character of Aristotle’s own work as pioneer. But it at least satisfies the requirement that the inquiry shall carry the plain man along with it. Actual modes of expression are shown to embody distinctions which average intelligence can easily recognize and will readily acknowledge, though they may tend by progressive rectification fundamentally to modify the assumption natural to the level of thought from which he begins. ”

“ The thought implied is thus that logic furnishes the tools with which every science has to work in establishing its results. Our space will only permit of a brief statement as to the points in which the Aristotelian formal logic appears to be really original, and the main peculiarities of Aristotle's theory of knowledge. ”

“ The reason for this is that Aristotle’s logic, the logic of classes, was based on his own scientific procedure as a zoologist, and is still in essence a valid method so far as classification is part of all rational procedure. But when we come to describe the mathematical method of physical science, we cannot cast it into the Aristotelian form without involving ourselves in such complicated artificialities as to reduce almost to nil the value of Aristotle’s logic as an organon. Aristotle’s logic enables us to make a single inference from two premises. ”

“ It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge. ”

“ What follows is inevitably, whether directly or indirectly, by sympathy or by antagonism, affected by the Aristotelian tradition.
A. Greek Logic
i. Before Aristotle
Logic needs as its presuppositions that thought should distinguish itself from things and from sense, that the problem of validity should be seen to be raised in the field of thought itself, and that analysis of the structure of The physical philosophers. thought should be recognized as the one way of solution. Thought is somewhat late in coming to self-consciousness. ”

“ This belongs to Case 2, and satisfies the second condition. The extreme Some s becomes All not-s,
∴ All not-s are s.
The other extreme treated in the same way would give
All not-s are s,
which is an equivalent result.
If we confine ourselves to the Aristotelian premises A, E, I, O, the second condition of inference in Case 2 is not needed. The conclusion will not necessarily be confined to the Aristotelian system. ”

“ The employment of the word Logic to denote the theory of Argumentation, is derived from the Aristotelian, or, as they are commonly termed, the scholastic, logicians. ”

“ In Aristotle's conception, while the processes of thought furnish a knowledge of reality or being, their formal operation constitutes the technique of investigation, and their systematic explanation and description constitute logic. Logic and metaphysics are distinguished as the science of being and the doctrine of the thought processes whereby being is known. Logic is the doctrine of the organon of science, and when applied is the organon of science. The logic of Aristotle is not a purely formal logic. ”

“ The Logic of Science deals, as might be expected, with the method of defining things,—that is, of saying what they are. But we do not here find the scholastic idea of definition, per genus et differentiam, by stating the class to which a thing belongs, and the characteristic which separates it from the rest of that class. Aristotle takes the more real and thorough position that, to define a thing adequately, you must state its cause. “Science itself,” he says, “is knowledge of a cause.” ”

“ For if nothing is true absolutely, and every truth has originated humbly in a guess that has grown into a successful hypothesis, it can always be suggested that after all it may benefit by a little more verification. It may be true enough psychologically and for practical purposes, but it does not realize the ideal of ‘logical certainty’.
§ 10. This ideal Logic has formulated from the first. Aristotle already was not content with merely analysing the form of reasoning; he aspired to formulate the norm of scientific demonstration. ”

“ It is a work which must excite our wonder if we consider the serried mass of observations which it contains, and the absolutely complete way in which it constructs a science and provides for it an appropriate nomenclature. Though countless generations of commentators and school-men have been busy with the ‘Analytics,’ and many modem philosophers have independently treated of Logic, none of them have been able to add a single point of any importance to Aristotle’s theory of deductive reasoning. The ‘Analytics’ are of course not light reading. ”

“ Thus did he become the founder of the logical but linguistic analysis of reasoning as discourse (ὁ ἔξω λόγος) into propositions and terms. Nevertheless, the deeper question remained, what is the logical but mental analysis of reasoning itself (ὁ ἔσω λόγος) into its mental premises and conclusion?
Aristotle thus was the founder of logic as a science. But he laid too much stress on reasoning as syllogism or deduction, and on deductive science; and he laid too much stress on the linguistic analysis of rational discourse into proposition and terms. ”

“ Then Aristotle, following out the method of his teachers, attempts to exhaust experience, and directs his inquiries into the outward world of sense and observation, but all with the view of discovering from phenomena the unconditional truth, in which he, too, believes. But every thing in this world is fleeting and transitory, and, therefore, it is not easy to arrive at truth. A cold doubt creeps into the experimental mind of Aristotle with all his learning and all his logic. ”

“ Since Aristotle, logic has, without serious impediment or check, matured its rules and methods. Holding the same cardinal positions as in Aristotle's time, it has simply made them stronger, the rules being but interpretations of rational principles, the methods following precisely the indications of the human mind, which from the nature of the case remain always the same. ”

“ One would suppose [333] that "all men are some animals," would have been the logical phrase in all time: but the predicate never was quantified. The few who alluded to the possibility of such a thing found reasons for not adopting it over and above the great reason, that Aristotle did not adopt it. For Aristotle never ruled in physics or metaphysics in the old time with near so much of absolute sway as he has ruled in logic down to our own time. ”

“ A more important lack which results is that of any clear intimation as to the relation in which Aristotle supposed it to The logical treatises. stand to other disciplines. In his definite classification of the sciences, [32] into First Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, it has no place. Its axioms, such as the law of contradiction, belong to first philosophy, but the doctrine as a whole falls neither under this head nor yet, though the thought has been entertained, under that of mathematics, since logic orders mathematical reasoning as well as all other. ”

“ We return then to the old view of Aristotle, that truth is believing in being; that sense is true of its immediate objects, and reasoning from sense true of its mediate objects; and that logic is the science of reasoning with a view to truth, or Logica est ars ratiocinandi, ut discernatur verum a falso. All we aspire to add is that, in order to attain to real truth, we must proceed gradually from sense, memory and experience through analogical particular inference, to inductive and deductive universal inference or reasoning. ”

“ But since there is one kind of thinker who is even above the natural philosopher (for nature is only one particular genus of being) , the discussion of these truths also will belong to him whose inquiry is universal and deals with primary substance. Physics also is a kind of Wisdom, but it is not the first kind.—And the attempts of some who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a want of training in logic ”

“ Aristotle is fond of declaring that knowledge is of the universal, while existence or reality is individual. It seems to follow that the cleavage between knowledge and reality is not bridged by the function of νοῦς in relation to “induction.” What is known is not real, and what is real is not known. ”

“ He himself recognizes τύχη and τὸ αὐτομάτον as co-ordinate agents with Mind in producing the phenomena of the universe; the department allotted to them being composed of all the classes of phenomena which are not supposed to follow any uniform law. By thus including Chance among efficient causes, Aristotle fell into an error which philosophy has now outgrown, but which is by no means so alien to the spirit even of modern speculation as it may at first sight appear. ”

“ Men reasoned, generation after generation, long before they knew a single dialectical rule, or had any notion of the construction of the syllogism. The principles of logic were operative in every ratiocination, yet the reasoner was incognisant of their influence until Aristotle anatomised the process, and gave out the law of thought in its more obvious and ordinary workings. Whether Aristotle's rudiments of logic have not an antecedent rudiments—which time may yet bring to light—is a somewhat unsettled problem in speculation. ”

“ Nearer to our present form of the ontological predicate comes, however, Aristotle’s conception of Possible Being, a conception which plays a great part in the whole Aristotelian theory of Nature. The ens in potentia of the Aristotelian system occupies a place in a realistic doctrine. Aristotle insists that possibilities are in one sense real beings. Is not an architect a house-builder even when he is not building houses? Is not the sleeper potentially awake? Is not every natural process the realization of possibility? ”

“ We cannot write a history of the varied origin of logic, beyond putting the rudimentary logic of the proposition in the De Interpretatione before the less rudimentary theory of categories as significant names capable of becoming predicates in the Categories, and before the maturer analysis of the syllogism in the Analytics. But at any rate the process was gradual; and Aristotle was advanced in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, before he became the founder of logic. ”

“ From this brief sketch of Aristotle's logical views it will be seen that the epistemological and metaphysical relations of logic which involve its greatest difficulty and cause the greatest diversity in its modern exponents, were present in undeveloped form to the mind of the first logician. It would require a mighty optimism to suppose that this difficulty and diversity, which has increased rather than diminished in the progress of historical philosophy, should suddenly be made to vanish by some magic of restatement of subject-matter, or theoretical delimitation of the discipline. ”

“ Since the revolution which dislodged Aristotle from the schools, logicians may almost be divided into those who have looked upon reasoning as essentially an affair of Ideas, and those who have looked upon it as essentially an affair of Names. ”

“ Take, for example, Hope. When we say that it is a state of mind, we predicate Substance: we may also describe how great it is (Quantity) , what is the quality of it, pleasurable or painful (Quality) , what it has reference to (Relation) . Aristotle seems to have framed the Categories on the plan--Here is an individual; what is the final analysis of all that we can predicate about him?"
This is doubtless a true statement of the leading idea in the classification. The Category οὐσία was certainly understood by Aristotle to be a general name for all possible answers to the question Quid sit? ”

“ The conception of linkage needs to be deepened by the realization of the middle term as the ground of nexus in a real order which is also rational.
Aristotle’s solution of the paradox of inference, viz. of the fact that in one sense to go beyond what is in the premises is fallacy, while in another sense not to go beyond them is futility, lies in his formula of implicit and explicit, potential and actual. ”

“ But in some of this reasoning he was mistaken, Aristotle observes, from not distinguishing the condition of potentiality from reality, since the same object may simultaneously, when in potentiality, be and not be, although this cannot hold good of the same when in reality. ”

“ It seems true that the founder of logic, Aristotle, regarded logic not as a science, but rather as propædeutic to science, and not as an end in itself, but rather technically and heuristically as an instrument. In other words, logic was conceived by him rather in its application or as an art, than as a science, and so it continued to be regarded until the close of the Middle Ages, being characterized indeed as the ars artium ”

“ Yet the whole Aristotelian school pass over the problem as lightly. They all seem to believe that, while it is merely low cunning to make a discovery, it is a real proof of mental capacity to arrange it ‘in logical order’ after it has been made, and to show how far short it falls of the logical ideal. ”