Analyses Of Aristotle

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light on our own conceptual presuppositions. This collection comprises several striking interpretations that Jaakko Hintikka has put forward over the years, constituting a challenge not only to Aristotelian scholars and historians of ideas, but to everyone interested in logic, epistemology or metaphysics and in their history.

Presents a new interpretation of Aristotle's Analytics (the Prior and Posterior Analytics) as a unified whole, and argues that to "loose up"or solve -- rather than to reduce or break up -- is the principle meaning which best characterizes the Analytics. Offering a new interpretation of Aristotle's Analytics (the Prior and Posterior Analytics) as a unified whole, Patrick H. Byrne argues that a non-deductive form of ancient mathematical analysis influenced Aristotle's thinking. Reading the Analytics with this perspective in mind sheds new light on Aristotle's theories of the syllogism, demonstration, and the principles of science. The book begins with a brief survey of ancient geometrical analysis and an investigation of Aristotle's uses of the Greek term, analuein. Byrne argues that "to loose up" or solve -- rather than to reduce or break up -- is the principal meaning which best characterizes Aristotle's Analytics. Extending this line of reasoning, he argues that for Aristotle scientific analysis commonly begins with knowledge of a "mere fact" (a conclusion) and seeks a rigorous demonstration which expresses knowledge of the "reasoned fact". Moreover, genuine analysis of a fact into a reasoned fact cannot be accomplished unless the premises of demonstrations are themselves reasoned facts. Hence the processes which yield the immediate principles (especially definitions) are next investigated through detailed examinations of key examples which Aristotle provides.

Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" is considered to be one of the most important treatises on ethics ever written. In an incredibly detailed study of virtue and vice in man, Aristotle examines one of the most central themes to man, the nature of goodness itself. In Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," he asserts that virtue is essential to happiness and that man must live in accordance with the "doctrine of the mean" (the balance between excess and deficiency) to achieve such happiness.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1806 edition. Excerpt: ... a great help both to memory and judgment. As the philosopher's province includes all things, human and divine, that can be objects of inquiry, he is naturaHy led to attempt some general division like that of the Categories. And the invention of a division of this kind, which the speculative part of mankind acquiesced in for two thousand years, marks a superiority of genius in the inventor, whoever he was. Nor does it appear that the general divisions which, since the decline of the Peripatetic philosophy, have been substituted in place of the ten categories, are more perfect. Locke has reduced all things to three categories; viz. substances, modes, and relations. In this division, time, space, and number, three great objects of human thought, are omitted. The author of the Treatise of Human Nature has reduced all things to two categories, viz. ideas and impressions: a division which is very well adapted to his system, and which puts me in mind of another made by a very excellent mathematician in a printed thesis I have seen. In it the author, after a severe censure of the ten categories of the Peripatetics, maintains that there neither are nor can be more than two categories of things, viz. data and quanta. There are two ends that may be proposed by such divisions. The first is, to methodize or digest in order what a man actually knows. This is neither unimportant nor impracticable > and in proportion to the solidity and accuracy of a man's judgment, his divisions of the things he knows will be elegant and useful. The same subject may admit, and even require, various divisions, according to the different points of view from which we contemplate it: nor does it follow, that because one division is good, therefore another is naught. To...