Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons^™

The Birth Of Logic, John Corcoran

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The last two decades have witnessed a debate concerning whether Aristotle's syllogistic is a system of deductive discourses having epistemic import exemplifying an Aristotelian theory of deductive reasoning and justifying the claim that Aristotle is the founder of logic taken as the scientific study of proof or whether, on the contrary, the syllogistic is a system of true propositions of a theory of classes justifying the claim that Aristotle is the founder of logic is taken as the scientific study of formal relations such as class inclusion. An epistemically-oriented interpretation has been contending with an ontically-oriented interpretation. This debate should …