Aristotle’s De Interpretatione: Contradiction and Dialectic

It is widely agreed that Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, but not the Topics, marks the beginning of formal logic. There is less agreement as to why this is so. What are the distinctive features in virtue of which Aristotle’s discussion of deductions (syllogismoi) qualifies as formal logic in the one treatise but not in the other? To answer this question, I argue that in the Prior Analytics—unlike in the Topics—Aristotle is concerned to make fully explicit all the premisses that are necessary to derive the conclusion in a given deduction.

The Beginnings of Formal Logic: Deduction in Aristotle’s Topics vs. Prior Analytics

At Categories7, 6a36-7 Aristotle defines relatives (R1), but at 8a13-28 worries that the definition may include some substances. Aristotle introduces a second account of relatives (R2, at 8a31-2) to solve the problem. Recent commentators have held that Aristotle intends to solve the extensional adequacy worry by restricting the extension of relatives. That is, R2 counts fewer items as relative than R1. However, this cannot explain Aristotle’s attitude to relatives, since he immediately returns to using R1. I propose a non-extensional reading. R1 and R2 do not specify different sets of relatives, but rather different ways to understand each relative.

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Aristotle’s Two Accounts of Relatives in Categories 7

Issuant views of hell in contemporary Anglo-American theology

Aristotle on Truth

In De Interpretatione 6-9, Aristotle considers three logical principles: the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the rule of contradictory pairs (according to which of any contradictory pair of statements, exactly one is true and the other false). Surprisingly, Aristotle accepts none of these without qualification. I offer a coherent interpretation of these chapters as a whole, while focusing special attention on two sorts of statements that are of particular interest to Aristotle: universal statements not made universally and future particular statements. With respect to the former, I argue that Aristotle takes them to be indeterminate and so to violate the rule of contradictory pairs. With respect to the latter, the subject of the much discussed ninth chapter, I argue that the rule of contradictory pairs, and not the principle of bivalence, is the focus of Aristotle’s refutation. Nevertheless, Aristotle rejects bivalence for future particular statements.

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Truth and Contradiction in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 6-9

I argue that the problem of religious luck posed by Zagzebski poses a problem for the theory of hell proposed by Buckareff and Plug, according to which God adopts an open-door policy toward those in hell. Though escapism is not open to many of the criticisms Zagzebski raises against potential solutions to the problem of luck, escapism fails to solve the problem: it merely pushes luck forward into the afterlife. I suggest a hybrid solution to the problem which combines escapism and the claim that God gives enough grace to those in hell to cancel out any bad moral luck.

Escapism and luck

T he Hippias Minor has long been held in low regard. The dialogue’s ultimate conclusion, that the one who voluntarily acts unjustly is the good person, has been thought by many readers to be beyond the pale of Socratic philosophy. Moreover, the path to that conclusion has seemed riddled with equivocation. Scholars have thus tended to treat the dialogue either as an early, false start, inferior to Plato’s other works, or else as nothing but an attack on hippias’ decidedly un-Socratic views. Against such interpretations, we hold that the dialogue’s arguments are soundly Socratic, and that its conclusion is not merely acceptable but integral to Socrates’ thought as we encounter it in other parts of the Platonic corpus. 1

The Wandering Hero of the Hippias Minor: Socrates on Virtue and Craft

M.M. McCabe argues that in Plato’s Euthydemus, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus hold a view she calls ‘chopped logos’. Chopped logos implies that nothing said is false, or opposed to any other statement...

Russell E. Jones

Papers

Truth and Contradiction in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 6-9

Escapism and luck

The Wandering Hero of the Hippias Minor: Socrates on Virtue and Craft

Eristic Combat at Euthydemus 285e–286b

Aristotle on the Love of Friends