Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-19T04:10:52.138Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Late Antiquity

from I - The Development of Logic in Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2023

Luca Castagnoli
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Paolo Fait
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Logic didn’t develop much in the period from the early Stoics to Boethius. Certainly, there was nothing to match the ground-breaking discoveries of Aristotle and Chrysippus. Aristotle found for us the figures of the syllogism, and in the course of proving those forms to be correct, uncovered and exploited numerous logical laws. He even managed to make steps in the right direction with his modal syllogistic. The early Stoics found for us the indemonstrables, the method of analysis, and the themata. There are few, if any, comparable discoveries in the later period. The closest anyone came was Galen with his relational syllogisms, a ‘third class’ of syllogisms that Galen argued was a necessary supplement to Aristotelian and Stoic syllogistic. Moreover, it is also hard to deny that there were some steps backwards taken by some of the later logicians, by which I mean there were some serious misunderstandings of the logical theory of their predecessors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×