History of Philosophy Commons^™

Holding For The Most Part: The Demonstrability Of Moral Facts, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

No abstract provided.

Prior Analytics And Aristotle's Commitment To Logos, George Boger

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Prior Analytics describes a natural deduction system as part of an underlying logic. It is a proof-theoretic treatise concerned principally to establish and to perfect a deduction system for science. Aristotle knew that deductions about matters pertaining to a given subject matter are content specific and that they employ a topic neutral deduction system; such a system makes evident that given sentences logically follow from other given sentences. One process of deduction is accomplished through taking pairs of given categorical sentences to generate immediate inferences according to prescribed rules, which categorical inferences are then added to the given sentences and …

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 …

Existence Claims In The Posterior Analytics, Richard D. Mckirahan Jr.

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Existence Claims in the Posterior Analytics

Richard McKirahan

This paper treats several questions about the place of existence claims in theory of science presented in the Posterior Analytics. On the basis of a close reading of the text it shows that Aristotle identifies existence claims as a distinct kind of scientific principles (alongside definitions and common principles), that what these principles declare to exist are the subjects as opposed to the attributes that the science studies (triangles, as opposed to the property of having angles equal to two right angles), and not all the subjects, but a subset of them, …