Two main claims are defended. The first is that negative categorical statements are not to be accorded existential import insofar as they figure in the square of opposition. Against Kneale and others, it is argued that Aristotle formulates his o statements, for example, precisely to avoid existential commitment. This frees Aristotle's square from a recent charge of inconsistency. The second claim is that the logic proper provides much thinner evidence than has been supposed for what appears to be the received (...) view, that is, for the view that insofar as they occur in syllogistic negative categoricals have existential import. At most there is a single piece of evidence in favor of the view?a special case of echthesis or the setting out of a case in proof. (shrink)

. The truth conditions that Aristotle attributes to the propositions making up the traditional square of opposition have as a consequence that a particular affirmative proposition such as ‘Some A is not B’ is true if there are no Bs. Although a different convention than the modern one, this assumption remained part of centuries of work in logic that was coherent and logically fruitful.

This is the first full-length translation of a work by the influential medieval logician Walter Burley. As such, it is an important addition to our knowledge of medieval logic, and will undoubtedly spur further research.

This paper consists roughly of three parts. In the first part, an attempt has been made to find some tenable interpretation of Hamilton's logic. This results in accepting that Hamilton's logic can be "saved" if it is understood as being an everday language version of Euler's relations, i.e., extensional relations between terms. In the second part, the propositions of Euler and the propositions of Aristotle are compared and found to be interdefinable: every proposition of Aristotle can be defined by a (...) disjunction of Euler's propositions, and every proposition of Euler can be defined by a conjunction of Aristotle's propositions. In the third part, extensional interpretation is applied to the traditional logic. As a result the 19 traditional syllogisms are reduced to 11. (shrink)