Without Qualification: An Inquiry into the Secundum Quid

SOUTHERN SPEECH COMMUNICATION JOURNAL, 1974

A review of the Aristotelian Organon and subsequent modern interpretations of the criteria for species of the syllogism. Focus on the rhetorical syllogism rather than the corruption by modern predicate logic.

Méthexis, 2018

for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Daniel De Haan made our English more idiomatic. We thank the anonymous reviewer for her/his careful remarks. We are responsible for any remaining shortcoming or mistake.

Aristotle University οf Thessaloniki - Interdisciplinary Centre for Aristotle Studies, A.U.Th ., 2019

The ideas that can be traced in Aristotle’s logical treatises have become since the ancient years the subject of inquiry for many scholars and commentators. In general, it can be argued that Aristotle’s theory of thinking is one of the most fruitful aspects of his philosophy with meanings meant to determine the way we understand human deliberation. It seems, however, that there are still concepts that encapsulate original ideas and, while identified, were not examined in depth by contemporary scholars. One such concept is ἀγχίνοια used by Aristotle in his Logic and Ethics in order to explain the meaning and structure of reasoning and specifically the way we come to conclusions spontaneously and intuitively without following a certain logical path. The process of ἀγχίνοια is neither apodictic, nor deductive, but rather instinctive, prompted by a natural tendency or impulse. As a non-rational concept, ἀγχίνοια does not follow or is controlled by logical rules. It is a non-inferential way that one can generate new ideas. This concept has been mainly discussed by philosophers and commentators of late Antiquity. The comments of the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Christian John Philoponus give us some useful insights on ἀγχίνοια and its cognitive character. Besides, in the paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics by Heliodorus of Prusa and the commentary of Eustratius of Nicaea one can trace additional insights on the character of ἀγχίνοια determined through its contradistinction to that of εὐβουλία. In this paper, I examine the idea of ἀγχίνοια as elaborated by Aristotle in different points of his treatises, but also in the texts of ancient commentators. What I try to show is that Aristotle’s ἀγχίνοια is a mechanism relying on instinct, while being at the same time a part of an inferential procedure, an important step in discovering a syllogism’s middle term. On that basis, I discuss its cognitive and heuristic role, something that Aristotle’s commentators acknowledged, thus contributing to the understanding of ἀγχίνοια in the edifice of Aristotle’s logic. (from the Introduction p. 562) (2019) "Tracking Aristotle’s ἀγχίνοια or the Mechanism Discovering the Middle Term of a Syllogism". In D. Sfendoni-Mentzou (ed.) Proceedings of the World Congress Aristotle 2400 Years, 562-568. Thessaloniki: Auth & DIKAM.

Principia: an international journal of epistemology, 2011

In the Organon Aristotle describes some deductive schemata in which inconsistencies do not entail the trivialization of the logical theory involved. This thesis is corroborated by three different theoretical topics by him discussed, which are presented in this paper. We analyse inference schema used by Aristotle in the Protrepticus and the method of indirect demonstration for categorical syllogisms. Both methods exemplify as Aristotle employs classical reductio ad absurdum strategies. Following, we discuss valid syllogisms from opposite premises (contrary and contradictory) studied by the Stagerian in the Analytica Priora (B15). According to him, the following syllogisms are valid from opposite premises, in which small Latin letters stand for terms such as subject and predicate, and capital Latin letters stand for the categorical propositions such as in the traditional notation: (i) in the second fig

Archai , 2023

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to delimitate what the dialectical syllogism looks like in Aristotle's Topics. Aristotle never gave an example of a dialectical syllogism, but we have some clues spread over books I and VIII of the Topics which make it possible to understand at least what within a dialectical debate is a dialectical syllogism. The interpretation advanced here distinguishes the logical order of the dialectical argumentation from the order of the debate. This distinction enables us to have a better understanding of what is and how the dialectical syllogism is identified in the debate. In addition, we can solve some interpretative difficulties other interpretations could not solve, and have a more solid grasp of how endoxa are used in a dialectical debate.

Argumentation

In chapter 8 of the Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle claims that his theory of fallacy is complete in the sense that there cannot be more fallacies than the ones he lists. In this article I try to explain how Aristotle could have justified this completeness claim by analysing how he conceptualizes fallacies (dialectical mistakes which do not appear so) and what conceptual ingredients play a role in his discussion of fallacies. If we take the format of dialectical discussions into account, we will see that there are only so many mistakes one can make which still do not appear to be mistakes. Aristotle's actual list is almost identical to these apparent mistakes.

1997

Aristotle studies syllogistic argumentation in Sophistical Refutations and Prior Analytics. In the latter he focuses on the formal and syntactic character of arguments and treats the sullogismoi and nonsullogismoi as argument patterns with valid or invalid instances. In the former Aristotle focuses on semantics and rhetoric to study apparent sullogismoi as object language arguments. Interpreters usually take Sophistical Refutations as considerably less mature than Prior Analytics. Our interpretation holds that the two works are more of a piece than previously believed and, indeed, that Aristotle's treatment of fallacious reasoning presupposes the results of the formal theory.

Synthese, 2015

This paper sets out to evaluate the claim that Aristotle's Assertoric Syllogistic is a relevance logic or shows significant similarities with it. I prepare the grounds for a meaningful comparison by extracting the notion of relevance employed in the most influential work on modern relevance logic, Anderson and Belnap's Entailment. This notion is characterized by two conditions imposed on the concept of validity: first, that some meaning content is shared between the premises and the conclusion, and second, that the premises of a proof are actually used to derive the conclusion. Turning to Aristotle's Prior Analytics, I argue that there is evidence that Aristotle's Assertoric Syllogistic satisfies both conditions. Moreover, Aristotle at one point explicitly addresses the potential harmfulness of syllogisms with unused premises. Here, I argue that Aristotle's analysis allows for a rejection of such syllogisms on formal grounds established in the foregoing parts of the Prior Analytics. In a final section I consider the view that Aristotle distinguished between validity on the one hand and syllogistic validity on the other. Following this line of reasoning, Aristotle's logic might not be a relevance logic, since relevance is part of syllogistic validity and not, as modern relevance logic demands, of general validity. I argue that the reasons to reject this view are more compelling than the reasons to accept it and that we can, cautiously, uphold the result that Aristotle's logic is a relevance logic.

editions of Aristotle's Topics contain the following passage:

The Classical Quarterly (New Series), 2008

I discuss Aristotle’s definition of syllogism as it is formulated in Prior Analytics 24b18-20. I also considers Aristotle’s elucidations about the clause “because these things are so” as well as his definitions of perfect and imperfect syllogisms (24b20-26). I argue for that Aristotle’s definition is suited to the narrow notion of syllogism (instead of being wide enough to cover other forms of argument or deduction). My main point is to understand the clause “because these things are so” as referring to premise-pairs and as introducing the requirement that a premise-pair must be “the necessary one” for an argument to be a syllogism. With this approach, Aristotle’s definitions of perfect and imperfect syllogisms can be better understood as natural corollaries of his definition of syllogism avoiding most of the vexing troubles about that subject.

DIALOGUE¸—Journal of Phi Sigma Tau, 1969

An analysis of the ground for considering the Rhetoric as the completion of Aristotle's work on logic (syllogism).

Apeiron, 2009