Aristotle: Logic and Philosophy of Language, Misc

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When he (...) gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

My aim is to show that, in Posterior Analytics B 8, the conception of lunar eclipse brought about by pre-demonstrative knowledge (hoti) is deeply vague and radically different from the one obtained by demonstrative knowledge (dioti).

The work of this dissertation, in a broad sense, seeks to rescue what may be in the original project or nucleus of philosophy, from its Socratic arising: the idea of elucidative rationality. This rationality is aimed at expressing our practices in a way that can be confronted with objections and alternatives. The notion of expression is central to this rationality. This centrality is elucidated by the contemporary philosopher Brandom (1994, 2000, 2008a, 2013), from his view of the semantic inferentialism. With (...) this view, this dissertation, in a strict sense, investigates evidences that leads to the distinction of the inferentially expressivist tradition of syllogistic. In this semantic inferentialism, logic is the “organ of semantic self-consciousness”. In this sense, logic does not define the rational, in the most basic sense, but allows us to be aware, through inferential articulation, of the conceptual contents, which govern all our thoughts. Evidences presented in the work of this dissertation seek to show that the syllogism is marked by the logical-elucidative character of this semantic self-consciousness, because of its expressive role as inseparable from the notion of inference. In the first part of this dissertation, then, the tradition of syllogistics is examined, in which the expression is the main notion. This study is based on the tradition of syllogistics, composed of the Aristotelian school of Campinas, organized by Angioni (2014a), the logical economist Keynes (1906), and the “formalist” schools, represented mainly by the logician Łukasiewicz (1957, 1929/1963) and by Corcoran (1972, 1974, 2009, 2015). The main claims of the Campinas school are analyzed: the non-epistemological, but explanatory, exposition of (scientific) knowledge, in the syllogism, the secondary role of the notion of truth, the priority of the predicative structure, and the suggestion of approaching of the syllogistic to the relevant system of logic. In this analysis, we add the discussion about the reasoning of the epagogic type, important to the practical understanding of the “first principles”. The key points of Keynes are also discussed: the semantic priority of propositional judgment and the explanatory role of deductive inference. The second part of this dissertation discusses the relation between expression, inference and the expressive role of logic, based on the semantic inferentialism of Brandom. In order to discuss this relationship, propaedeutic questions are raised, related to the semantic role of sentences and subsentences (terms and predicates) in language, to different conceptions of logical validity, beyond the truth-functional aspect, to the logical demarcation of symbolic rules, to demarcation of logic, the idea of “formal logic”, and the removal of formal semantics from natural language concern. Next, the theoretical framework of Brandom's semantic inferentialism is presented. In this framework, the idea of philosophical semantics, pragmatisms of the semantic and conceptual type, expressivisms of the rationalist, logical and propositional conceptual type, and the semantically primitive notion of incompatibility come into play. Thus, to those who are interested in the correspondence between ancient logic and modern logic, the work of this dissertation offers a useful contribution, especially to projects of formalization of the syllogistics, which need not appeal against or in favor of a strictly formal approach to logic. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is twofold: I will try to clarify what the conditions developed in EN I a discipline or an argument must meet to be assumed as precise are, and, then, try to present evidence that the exam of akrasia in EN VII 3 meets these conditions. In the first part of this paper, I will select passages in which such conditions are displayed, and also distinguish between practical precision and theoretical precision. In the second part, where (...) the analysis of the senses of having but not using knowledge in EN VII 3 is carried on, I will claim that Aristotle’s objective is reaching the adequate statement of the explanandum that will be the subject of causal enquiry of akrasia. My concluding remarks will claim that the conditions displayed in this paper’s first part are met by Aristotelian procedure in EN VII 3. (shrink)

The main aim of my paper is to analyse Aristotle’s theory of language in the context of his Physics I.1 and via an analysis and an interpretation of this part of his Physics I try to show that (i) the study of human language (logos) significantly falls within the competence of Aristotle’s physics (i.e. natural philosophy), (ii) we can find the results of such (physical) inquiry in Aristotle’s zoological writings, stated in the forms of the first principles, causes and elements (...) of the human speech (logos) and (iii) the analogies (Phys. 184b13-14) made by Aristotle at the very end of the first chapter make better sense if we consider them in the broader context in which Aristotle recognizes language as a complex natural phenomenon we are born into and which has to be not only biologically, but also socially developed through our lives. Hence, I aim towards a more naturalistic reading of Aristotle’s views on language. (shrink)

This article is intended to examine the structure and scope of the argumentation drawn in Metaphysics Γ 4, 1006a18-b34. As we shall see, though this passage does not bring a complete proof of the Principle of Non-Contradiction, it corresponds to its first step, which consists in determining the conditions of meaning necessary for discourse. That passage encloses in nuce the reasons which underlie Aristotelian conviction con- cerning the conventional nature of names and also brings to light the way this conven- (...) tional nature of names must be understood according to Aristotle. (shrink)

The expressions ‘form’, ‘structure’, ‘schema’, ‘shape’, ‘pattern’, ‘figure’, ‘mold’, and related locutions are used in logic both as technical terms and in metaphors. This paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyses uses of [FOR these PUT such] expressions by logicians. No [FOR such PUT similar] project has been attempted previously. After establishing general terminology, we present a variant of traditional usage of the expression ‘logical form’ followed by a discussion of the usage found in the two-volume Chateaubriand book Logical Forms (2001 and (...) 2005)—the most comprehensive work on the subject ever written and in many ways the focus of this paper. Key Words: morphology, character, sense, sentence, proposition, form, structure, schema, alternative constituent, type, token . (shrink)

Meontology of Gorgias vs. Nihilism. The purpose of this paper is to challenge Gorgias’ image of a “nihilist existentialist”. The original thesis ouden estin, too frequently rendered as „nothing exists”, thus reducing the verb “to be” to denote “bare” existence, and ouden to denote “nothingness”. On close inspection, it turns out that, in Gorgias, neither do we have a negation of reality nor an affirmative treatment of the word “nothingness”.Therefore, ouden” should not be understood as a negation of all reality (...) or a kind of affirmative “nothingness”, whereas “estin” should not be reduced to “bare” existence. (When existence is negated what we obtain is annihilation). Such practices still affect the various translations of Gorgias’ treaty On the non-being or on Nature. Gorgias’ “sophist” thought is typically interpreted as a joke or a parody of dialectical thinking of the Eleatics. In fact, as it turns out, he made no parody of dialectic but applied the elenctic, apagogic method in Zeno’s masterly manner. He did so not for an artificial purpose but to prove the absurdity of the hypothesis of absolute, transcendent (hence incognizable) one Truth-Being, which eliminates the non-being of becoming as absolute non-being. Gorgias argued in earnest in favour of relative being as such, Becoming as the only reality, which from the point of view of absolute being is after all non-being, but not-this-being, or relative non-being but not non-relative non-being, as the Eleatics had claimed. Gorgias’ positions appears to be an apologia of non-being which is, that is of Becoming. We do not transform the “nothing” into a “no thing”. The main question of the treaty is: what is predicated by the word “nothing”? Gorgias’ position can be recapitulated as “nothing is sc. true, there is no criterion because, after all, everything is opinion. It is reinforced further by meontological, i.e. anti-eleatic Gorgias’ emphasis: “No thing is Being (substance)”, because everything is Becoming. Thus the title if Gorgias’ treaty can thus be treated as as an antithesis to that of Melissos’, which – in our opinion – is to emphasize the “non-beingness” of nature, the non-substantiality of things. Therefore, if Gorgias’ text was polemical, and it questioned (while at the same time maintaining the positivity of Becoming as non-being) only the immutability of things, and thus we cannot speak of the existence or the cognizability of natures or of essences of things. In sum, the reasoning of Zeno and Melissos was of a kind that is apt to cut both ways, and that is what Gorgias showed. The argument given as peculiar to himself was to this effect. “What is not” is not, so, it is just as much as “what is”. It is as if the onset of the issues that Plato will take up in The Sophist as the problem of non-being understood as difference. The axis of Gorgias’s anti-eleatic critique, in our view, is his polemic with Parmenides’ famous thesis B3 regarding the relationship of identity or equality between noein and einai. It is an additional and perhaps the most important point of his critique that aims at demonstrating that such relationship is impossible. In brief, things are not words just as thoughts are not words. (shrink)

I try to read Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric as if they were an integral part of the Organon instead of separate works as they were sorted by Andronicus of Rhodes. The results are quite surprising. First, poetics and rhetoric, considered as sciences of speech, were much more intimately related to Aristotle's analytical logic than it is generally acknowledged by prominent interpreters. I maintain that Dialectics (the Topics) operated as a bridge leading from these two sciences to analytical logic; that the (...) types of speech encompassed by the four respective sciences did not only form a ladder, ascending from the more loose forms of persuasion to the more rigorous ones, but that there was between them a whole net of cross-currents and implications that were too much obvious for Aristotle to remain unaware of them, notwithstanding the fact that he doesn’t describe them anywhere. I maintain, in short, there was an unified science of persuasive speech, whose principles were implicitly intertwined in the fabric of Aristotle's Organon. By means of a comparative study of the works consecrated by Aristotle to poetics, rhetoric, dialectics and analytics, these principles could be unearthed and accurately expressed. I called them the theory of the four discourses. (shrink)

This paper explores some aspects of Aristotle’s notion of subject for predications. I examine the argument Aristotle develops in Posterior Analytics I.22, 83a1-14. I argue that the notion advanced by Aristotle in that argument is different from the one found in his Categories, although they are far from being incompatible with each other. I also add some philological considerations to justify the Portuguese translation of “hypokeimenon” as “algo subjacente” (“underlying thing”) instead of “sujeito” (“subject”).

This paper attempts to clarify the nature and the importance of a third kind of sophistic argument that is not always found in the classification of those arguments in the secondary literature. An argument of the third kind not only is a valid one, but is also constituted of true propositions. What makes it a sophistic argument is the fact that it produces a false semblance of scientific explanation: its explanation seems to be appropriate to the explanandum without being so. (...) Evidence from this kind of argument comes from Sophistic Refutations 11, and Brison’s attempt to square the circle should be counted as one of its instances. (shrink)

This is an introductory handbook for some of the main themes around the notion of predication in Aristotle. It does not aim at being exhaustive, but only sketches some important lines about the subject; it contains an introductory essay, besides the translation (into Portuguese) and commentary of basic texts (such as Posterior Analytics I-22, Categories 1-5, Interpretation 1-6 etc.).

Usage and limits of analogy and metaphor in Aristotle’s science could be confusing. In some passages Aristotle uses both elements in explanations, and their clarity is defended. However, in other texts the metaphor is excluded from science. In this article, I will analyze the difference between metaphor and analogy and examine in what context metaphor can be used. My thesis is that Aristotle uses the analogy as an argumentative resource understood by epagoge. On the case of metaphors, they should be (...) excluded from science, but is a valid strategy for some kind of speeches, and as a pedagogical element of explanations. Key words: metaphor, analogy, argumentation, science, language. (shrink)