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4 results

  • 4 - Late Antiquity
  • from I - The Development of Logic in Antiquity
  • Edited by Luca Castagnoli, University of Oxford, Paolo Fait, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Logic
  • Published online: 29 April 2023
  • Print publication: 02 March 2023, pp 82-106
  • View extract

    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.

  • Chapter 9 - The Sceptic’s Modes of Argumentation
  • Edited by Thomas Bénatouïl, Université de Lille, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Université de Genève
  • Book: Dialectic after Plato and Aristotle
  • Published online: 26 October 2018
  • Print publication: 15 November 2018, pp 283-319
  • View extract

    Summary

    Sextus Empiricus' Ten Modes of Scepticism seem to be devices to generate equal and opposing arguments to dogmatic arguments. An account is proposed of Sextus' Five Modes (the Modes of Agrippa) according to which they should be viewed in the same way. This contrasts with the usual interpretation of them, where they are thought of as codifying the sceptic’s rejection of certain types of argumentation on the basis of the sceptic’s taking a view about the epistemic inadequacy of those types of argumentation. On the proposed interpretation, when the sceptic deploys the Five Modes, he finds himself unmoved by a certain dogmatic argument because he finds himself in a state of suspension of judgement in the face of equal and opposing arguments, and not because he rejects on epistemic grounds the way in which the dogmatist argued. An analogy is suggested between the the Aristotelian topoi and the sceptical modes as being devices for generating arguments.