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The Relationship of aristotle's Two Analytics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Robin Smith
Robin Smith
Affiliation:
Kansas State University
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Extract

In 1928, Friedrich Solmsen argued that Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was largely composed before the Prior Analytics. Ross rejected Solmsen's position in 1939, and a rather lengthy series of rebuttals and counter-attacks between the two scholars followed. Quite recently, Jonathan Barnes has revived this issue with arguments in favour of something very close to Solmsen's thesis: that Aristotle first developed a theory of demonstration (‘apodeictic’) before he had worked out the syllogistic, and that the Posterior Analytics was originally conceived against this background. Subsequently, when Aristotle formulated a syllogistic, he is supposed by Barnes to have revised or added to the contents of the Posterior Analytics so as to make syllogistic the logic of Aristotelian science. Thus, Barnes says: ‘the syllogism is in fact an incidental adjunct to the theory of demonstration: the theory can be formulated without reference, explicit or implicit, to Syllogistic, and it could have been discovered by someone who knew nothing whatever about the Syllogism’ (pp. 33–4).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , December 1982 , pp. 327 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1982

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References

1 Solmsen, Friedrich, Die Entwicklung der aristotelischen Logik undRhetorik (Neue philologische Untersuchungen, ed. Jaeger, W., Heft 4, Berlin, 1928).Google Scholar

2 “The Discovery of the Syllogism’, Philosophical Review 48 (1939), 251–72. For a full documentation of the Ross-Solmsen dispute, see p. 17 n. 1 of the work cited in the next footnote.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ‘Proof and the Syllogism’ in Berti, E. and Mignucci, M., eds., Aristotle on Science: the‘Posterior Analytics’ (Padua, 1981), pp. 17–59.Google Scholar

4 Claim (2) is defended in ‘The Syllogism in Posterior Analytics I’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (forthcoming 1982); claim (3) is defended in ‘The Indemonstrability of Principles in Aristotelian Sciences’ (as yet unpublished; presented in abridged form to the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Philadelphia, 1981).

5 In the remainder of this paper, I cite the following by author's name: Barnes, Jonathan,Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Oxford, 1975);Google ScholarMignucci, Mario, L'argomentazione dimostrativa in Arislotele: commento agli Analitici Secondi, I (Padua, 1975);Google Scholar John Philoponus, In Aristotelis Analytica Posteriora (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XIII. 3); Ross, W. D., Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics (Oxford, 1949).Google Scholar

6 I use ‘Aab’, ‘Eab’, ‘lab’’, ‘Oab’, for ‘All a is b’, ‘No a is b’, ‘somea is b’, 'some a is not b’.

7 In an unpublished manuscript, John Corcoran has shown that the process of ‘perfecting’ τЄλЄιоθαι or ‘completing’ πЄраίνεθαί a syllogism is totally distinct from the ‘reduction’ άνáγЄινάναγωγη of one syllogism to another. On Corcoran's view, which I believe is correct, perfecting a syllogism is constructing a deduction of its conclusion from its premisses. Reduction, by contrast, is a process for transforming one argument into another such that the latter argument is valid only if the former is also. Corcoran notes that Aristotle reserves the term ‘reduction’ for direct reductions (i.e. those not per impossibile) and that the phrase αναγωγήέѕτòαδύναТоν does not actually occur in the Prior Analytics (Aristotle usually says ‘proof through the impossible’ or ‘abduction’ αἱγαγωγή to the impossible’). See Corcoran, 's ‘A Mathematical Model of Aristotle's Syllogistic’, Archivfür Geschichte der Philosophie 55 (1973), 191–219, for his account of the process of perfecting syllogisms.Google Scholar

8 For further discussion of this subject, see my articles cited in note 4 and Jonathan Lear, Aristotle and Logical Theory (Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 2.Google Scholar

9 For a survey of the various interpretations offered see Mignucci, pp. 221–9, and Husik, I., ‘Aristotle on the Law of Contradiction and the Basis of the Syllogism’, Mind 15 (1906), 218–20.Google Scholar

10 See, for instance, Rose, Lynn, Aristotle's Syllogistic (Springfield, III., 1968), pp. 9–12.Google Scholar