Analyses of Aristotle

ISBN-13: 9789048165780 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 238 str.

Jaakko Hintikka

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Origin of the essays. Introduction. 1. On Aristotle's notion of existence. 2. Semantical games, the alleged ambiguity of `is', and Aristotelian categories. 3. Aristotle's theory of thinking and its consequences for his methodology. 4. On the role of modality in Aristotle's metaphysics. 5. On the ingredients of an Aristotelian science. 6. Aristotelian axiomatics and geometrical axiomatics. 7. Aristotelian induction. 8. (with Ilpo Halonen) Aristotelian explanations. 9. Aristotle's incontinent logician. 10. On the development of Aristotle's ideas of scientific method and the structure of science. 11. What was Aristotle doing in his early logic, anyway?: A reply to Woods and Hansen. 12. Concepts of scientific method from Aristotle to Newton. 13. The fallacy of fallacies. 14. Socratic questioning, logic, and rhetoric.

O autorze

Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.