Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
VOLUME 6
ANALYSES OF ARISTOTLE
No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher
v
ORIGIN OF THE ESSAYS
All permissions granted for the previously published essays by their respective
copyright holders are most gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to
the editors of the volumes in which these articles appeared previously and to
the co-author of one of the articles.
vii
viii ORIGIN OF THE ESSAYS
11. ‘‘What was Aristotle doing in his early logic, anyway?: A reply to Woods
and Hanson’’, Synthese vol. 113 (1997), pp. 241–249 (Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht).
12. ‘‘Concepts of scientific method from Aristotle to Newton’’, in Knowledge
and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy, Vol. I, ed. by Monica Asztalos,
John E. Murdoch and Ilkka Niiniluoto, Helsinki, Acta Philosophica
Fennica, vol. 48 (1990), pp. 72–84. Reprinted with permission.
13. ‘‘The fallacy of fallacies’’, Argumentation vol. 1 (1987), pp. 211–238
(D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht).
14. ‘‘Socratic questioning, logic, and rhetoric’’, Revue Internationale de
Philosophie vol. 47, no. 184 (1993), pp. 5–30. Reprinted with permission.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of the introduction to a book should be the same as that of the
label on a medicine bottle. It should tell the reader how to use the text of the
book. The present volume needs such instructions more than most books,
including the earlier volumes of my selected papers. The main warning that
the label on this product should proclaim is not to read the papers printed or
reprinted here in the same way as fully polished contributions to scholarly
journals on ancient philosophy. I have been, and I continue to be, fascinated
by Aristotle’s philosophical ideas. I have thought about them, and I have come
up with a number of interpretations of them. The essays published or repub-
lished here are presentations of these interpretations. Alas, they are all sketches
rather than fully argued and documented papers. The reason is obvious. My
main lines of work in philosophy run elsewhere and have the first claim to my
working time and energy. I fully admit this orientation of my philosophical
interests does not excuse the sketchiness of my papers. Since I was aware of
the situation for a long time, I hoped to rewrite some of the papers published
here and replace some others by new ones in such a way that the interpretational
argumentation and scholarly documentation would be on the same level as in
specialized publications on ancient philosophy. Reluctantly, I have reached the
conclusion that I will never have a chance of doing so. Hence my only chance
of bringing my interpretational ideas to the attention of a wider philosophical
audience is to reprint the original papers as they are, with an explanation of
their status.
My main reason for doing so is a strong belief in the potential importance
of the interpretations I outline in these papers. The first and foremost aspect
of this importance is the giving of new general perspectives on Aristotle’s
philosophy. It might seem overoptimistic, not to say pretentious, to think that
after more than two millennia there could be unused clues to Aristotle’s
thinking. The fact nevertheless is, I believe, that in some cases the progress of
systematic conceptual analysis (and synthesis) puts what Aristotle is doing –
or, rather, thinking – in a new light. Even the most central concept of all,
ontology, the concept of being, bears witness to these opportunities. For a
century and a half, the consensus of philosophers is that this concept is
irreducibly ambiguous between being in the sense of identity, predication,
existence and subsumption. This assumption may be called the Frege-Russell
ambiguity thesis. But is the thesis true? Everybody admits that there are
different uses of words for being, but the Frege-Russell thesis tries to explain
ix
x INTRODUCTION
Last but not least, I thank my longtime publisher and their editors and other
staff not only for undertaking the publication of my selected papers but also
for carrying the project to a conclusion.