• Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic and modern relevance logic

    Author(s):
    Philipp Steinkrüger (see profile)
    Date:
    2015
    Group(s):
    Philosophy
    Subject(s):
    Philosophy, Ancient, Philosophy, History
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Aristotle, logic, relevance logic, Ancient philosophy, History of philosophy
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6VS7G
    Abstract:
    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.
    Notes:
    This is the final draft version of the published paper.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1007/s11229-014-0631-y
    Pub. Date:
    2015
    Journal:
    Synthese
    Volume:
    192
    Issue:
    5
    Page Range:
    1413 - 1444
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    7 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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