SALARIA, AARON LEVINSON U.

A.B MASS COMMUNICATION

LOGIC:

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle (Gr eek : Ἀριστοτέλης Ar is toté lē s ) (384 B C – 322 BC ) was a Greek ph il osophe r,
a s tudent o f Pla to and teac he r of Al exander the Grea t. He w rot e on di ver se s ubjec ts ,
inc lud ing ph ys ics , me ta ph ys ics , poet r y (i nc lud ing th ea ter ), biol og y and zoology ,
log ic , rh eto ri c, po li tic s, go ver nment , and et hic s. Along w ith Socra te s and Pla to,
Ar is tot le was one o f the mo st i nf luent ia l of th e anc ient G reek ph il osophe r s. T hey
tr an sf or med Presoc r ati c Gr eek ph ilo sophy in to the founda ti ons of Wes ter n ph il osoph y
as we kn ow i t. Some cons ider P lato and Ari st ot le to ha ve f ounded t wo of t he mo st
im por tan t sc hool s of Ancien t phi lo sophy ; othe r s con si der Ari sto tel ian is m a s a
de velopmen t and concr eti za tion of Pla to's in si ght sMe thodo log y

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle
gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and
experience, while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand, whilst Plato gestures to
the heavens, representing his belief in The Forms.
For more details on this topic, see Aristotle's theory of universals.

Aristotle defines his philosophy in terms of essence, saying that philosophy is "the science of the
universal essence of that which is actual". Plato had defined it as the "science of the idea",
meaning by idea what we should call the unconditional basis of phenomena. Both pupil and
master regard philosophy as concerned with the universal; Aristotle, however, finds the universal
in particular things, and called it the essence of things, while Plato finds that the universal exists
apart from particular things, and is related to them as their prototype or exemplar. For Aristotle,
therefore, philosophic method implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the
knowledge of essences, while for Plato philosophic method means the descent from a knowledge
of universal ideas to a contemplation of particular imitations of those ideas. In a certain sense,
Aristotle's method is both inductive and deductive, while Plato's is essentially deductive from a
priori principles.[3]

In Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" was a branch of philosophy that studied the
phenomena of the natural world, and included matters that today fall under the domain of physics,
biology, and other natural sciences. In modern times the scope of philosophy has come to be
more narrowly defined as limited to more generic or abstract inquiries such as ethics and
metaphysics, in which logic plays a major role, and as excluding the empirical study of the natural
world by means of the scientific method. In contrast, in Aristotle's time and use, philosophy was
taken to encompass all facets of intellectual inquiry.

In the larger sense of the word, Aristotle makes philosophy coextensive with reasoning, which he
also called "science". Note, however, that his use of the term science carries a different meaning
than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science (dianoia) is either
practical, poetical or theoretical". By practical science he means ethics and politics; by poetical
science, he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; while by theoretical science he
means physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.
If logic, or, as Aristotle calls it, Analytic, is regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, the
divisions of Aristotelian philosophy are: (1) Logic; (2) Theoretical Philosophy, including
Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics, (3) Practical Philosophy; and (4) Poetical Philosophy.

[edi t] Ep is te molog y

[edi t] Logic

Main article: term logic

For more details on this topic, see Non-Aristotelian logic.

Aristotle's conception of logic was the dominant form of logic up until the advances in
mathematical logic in the 19th century. Kant stated in the Critique of Pure Reason that Aristotle's
theory of logic had arrived at a complete account of the core of deductive inference. Aristotle
believed that being moderate in one’s desires lead to happiness because it allowed a person to
avoid the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum. He describes a middle region between an
excess of character and a deficiency of character. Neither one of those attitudes is to be desired,
but courage (the mean of the two) is a very honorable characteristic to have.

[edi t] His to r y

Aristotle "says that 'on the subject of reasoning' he 'had nothing else on an earlier date to speak
of'".[4] However, Plato reports that syntax was thought of before him, by Prodikos of Keos, who
was concerned by the right use of words. Logic seems to have emerged from dialectics; the
earlier philosophers used concepts like reductio ad absurdum as a rule when discussing, but
never understood its logical implications. Even Plato had difficulties with logic. Although he had
the idea of constructing a system for deduction, he was never able to construct one. Instead, he
relied on his dialectic, which was a confusion between different sciences and methods.[5] Plato
thought that deduction would simply follow from premises, so he focused on having good
premises so that the conclusion would follow. Later on, Plato realized that a method for obtaining
the conclusion would be beneficial. Plato never obtained such a method, but his best attempt was
published in his book Sophist, where he introduced his division method.

PLATO

. Pla to (Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "wide, broad-browed"[1]) (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), whose
original name was Aristocles, was an ancient Greek philosopher, the second of the great trio of
ancient Greeks –succeeding Socrates and preceding Aristotle– who between them laid the
philosophical foundations of Western culture.[2] Plato was also a mathematician, writer of
philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher
learning in the western world. Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to
have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death.

Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues.
Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered
spurious.[3] Plato is thought to have lectured at the Academy, although the pedagogical function of
his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty[citation needed]. They have historically been used to
teach philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.

Biogr aphy

Ea r ly lif e
 Main article: Early life of Plato

Bi r th and f ami l y

The exact birthdate of Plato is unknown. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars
estimate that he was born in Athens or Aegina[b] between 428 and 427 b.c.e.[a] His father was
Ariston. According to a disputed tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his
descent from the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus.[4] Plato's mother
was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and
lyric poet Solon.[5] Perictione was sister of Charmides and Critias, both prominent figures of the
Thirty Tyrants, the brief oligarchic regime, which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of
the Peloponnesian war (404-403 b.c.e.).[6] Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three
other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother
of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of his philosophical Academy).[6]
According to the Republic, Adeimantus and Glaucon were older than Plato.[7] Nevertheless, in his
Memorabilia, Xenophon presents Glaucon as younger than Plato.[8]

According to certain reports of ancient writers, Plato' s mother became pregnant through a
virginal conception: Ariston tried to force his attentions on Perictione, but failed of his purpose;
then the ancient Greek god Apollo appeared to him in a vision, and, as a result of it, Ariston left
Perictione unmolested.[9] Another legend related that, while he was sleeping as an infant, bees
had settled on the lips of Plato; an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse
philosophy.[10]

Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood, although the precise dating of his death is
difficult.[11] Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mother's brother,[12] who had served many
times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, the leader of the
democratic faction in Athens.[13] Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was
famous for his beauty.[14] Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes' second son, Antiphon, the half-
brother of Plato, who appears in Parmenides.[15]

In contrast to his reticence about himself, Plato used to introduce his distinguished relatives into
his dialogues, or to mention them with some precision: Charmides has one named after him;
Critias speaks in both Charmides and Protagoras; Adeimantus and Glaucon take prominent parts
in the Republic.[16] From these and other references one can reconstruct his family tree, and this
suggests a considerable amount of family pride. According to Burnet, "the opening scene of the
Charmides is a glorification of the whole [family] connection ... Plato's dialogues are not only a
memorial to Socrates, but also the happier days of his own family".[17]

DAVID HUM E

According to Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher was named Aristocles after his grandfather, but
his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, dubbed him "Platon", meaning "broad" on account of his
robust figure.[18] According to the sources mentioned by Diogenes (all dating from the Alexandrian
period), Plato derived his name from the breadth (platutês) of his eloquence, or else because he
was very wide (platus) across the forehead.[19] In the 21st century some scholars disputed
Diogenes, and argued that the legend about his name being Aristocles originated in the Hellenistic
age.[c]

Educ ation

Apuleius informs us that Speusippus praised Plato's quickness of mind and modesty as a boy, and
the "first fruits of his youth infused with hard work and love of study".[20] Plato must have been
instructed in grammar, music, and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time.[21]
Dicaearchus went so far as to say that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games.[22] Plato had also
attended courses of philosophy; before meeting Socrates, he first became acquainted with
Cratylus (a disciple of Heraclitus, a prominent pre-Socratic Greek philosopher) and the
Heraclitean doctrines.[23]

La ter l ife

Plato may have traveled in Italy, Sicily, Egypt and Cyrene. Said to have returned to Athens at the
age of forty, Plato founded one of the earliest known organized schools in Western Civilization on
a plot of land in the Grove of Hecademus or Academus. The Academy was "a large enclosure of
ground which was once the property of a citizen at Athens named Academus... some, however,
say that it received its name from an ancient hero" (Robinson, Arch. Graec. I i 16), and it operated
until 529 AD, when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium, who saw it as a threat to the
propagation of Christianity. Many intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent
one being Aristotle.

Pl ato and S oc r ates

Plato made himself seem as though he were part of the Socratic entourage but never says so
explicitly. In the Phaedo the title character lists those who were in attendance at the prison on
Socrates' last day and says "Plato was ill" (Phaedo 59b). In the Apology, Plato distances himself
from the inner circle. Socrates says there that the brothers of several of his former associates are
in the audience. He says that Adeimantus, brother to Plato, was present (Apology 34a).
Adeimantus appears in the Republic as a disputant.

Da vid Hu me (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776)[2] was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and
historian. He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy
and the Scottish Enlightenment. Although in recent years interest in Hume's work has centred on
his philosophical writing, it was as a historian that he first gained recognition and respect. His
The History of England[3] was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until
Macaulay's.[4]

Historians predominantly see Humean philosophy as a form of deep skepticism, but others argue
naturalism is equally central to his thought. Humean scholarship has tended to oscillate between
those who emphasize the skeptical component (such as the logical positivists), and those who
emphasize the naturalist component (such as Don Garrett, Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, and
Galen Strawson).

Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various
Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual
landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph
Butler.

Li fe

David Home (later Hume), the son of Joseph Home of Ninewells, advocate, and Katherine, Lady
Falconer, was born on 26 April 1711 (Old style) in a tenement on the North side of the
Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. Throughout his life Hume, who never married, was to spend time
occasionally at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire. (He changed his name to
Hume in 1734 because the English had difficulty in pronouncing Home in the Scottish manner.) He
was sent by his family to the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve
(fourteen would have been more normal). At first he considered a career in law, but came to have,
in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and
general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and
Vergil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring." He had little respect for professors,
telling a friend in 1735 "there is nothing to be learned from a Professor, which is not to be met
with in Books."[6]

At the age of eighteen Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "a new Scene
of Thought" which inspired him "to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to
it".[7] He did not recount what this was, but it seems likely to have been his theory of causality -
that our beliefs about cause and effect depend on sentiment, custom and habit, and no t upon
reason, no r upon abstract, timeless, general Laws of Nature. The careers open to a poor Scottish
gentleman in those days were very few. As Hume's options lay between a travelling tutorship and
a stool in a merchant's office, he chose the latter.

In 1734, after a few months in commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France. He had
frequent discourses with the Jesuits of the famous college in which Descartes was educated.
During his four years there, he laid out his life plan, resolving "to make a very rigid frugality supply
my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as
contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature."[8] While there, he completed A
Treatise of Human Nature at the age of twenty-six. Although many scholars today consider the
Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in the history of
philosophy, the public in Great Britain did not agree at first. Hume himself described the (lack of)
public reaction to the publication of the Treatise in 1739–40 by writing that it "fell dead-born from
the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots. But
being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted
with great ardour my studies in the country". There he wrote the Abstract[9] Without revealing his
authorship, he aimed to make his larger work more intelligible by shortening it. Even this
advertisement failed to enliven interest in the Treatise.[10]

The effort of writing the Treatise drove the youthful Hume to near insanity. To restore his
perspective he escaped to the common life.[11]

After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1744, he applied for the Chair of Ethics and
pneumatic philosophy at the University of Edinburgh but was rejected. During the Jacobite
Rebellion of 1745 he tutored the Marquise of Annandale (1720-92) officially described as a
"lunatic".[12] This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But, it was then that he started
his great historical work The History of Great Britain[13] which would take fifteen years and run to
over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period 1754 to 1762. During this period
he was involved with the Canongate Theatre and in this context associated with Lord Monboddo
and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. In 1748 he served for three years as
Secretary to General St Clair writing his Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding
later published as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry proved little more
successful than the Treatise.

Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends who argued
that as an atheist he lay outside the jurisdiction of the Church. Despite his acquittal—and,
possibly, due to the opposition of Thomas Reid of Aberdeen, who that year launched a Christian
critique of his metaphysics—Hume failed to gain the Chair of Philosophy at Glasgow. It was after
returning to Edinburgh in 1752, as he wrote in My Own Life, that "the Faculty of Advocates chose
me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the
command of a large library." It was this resource that enabled him to continue his historical
research for his History.

Hume achieved great literary fame as an essayist and historian. His enormous History of Great
Britain from the Saxon kingdoms to the Glorious Revolution was a best-seller in its day. In it,
Hume presented political man as a creature of habit, with a disposition to submit quietly to
established government unless confronted by uncertain circumstances. In his view, only religious
difference could deflect men from their everyday lives to think about political matters.
Tomb of David Hume in Edinburgh

Hume's early essay Of Superstition and Religion laid the foundations for nearly all subsequent
secular thinking about the history of religion. Critics of religion during Hume's time were required
to express themselves cautiously. Less than 15 years before Hume was born, 18-year-old college
student Thomas Aikenhead was put on trial for saying openly that he thought Christianity was
nonsense; he was later convicted and hanged for blasphemy. Hume followed the common practice
of expressing his views obliquely, through characters in dialogues. Hume did not acknowledge
authorship of Treatise until the year of his death, in 1776. His essays Of Suicide, and Of the
Immortality of the Soul and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were held from publication
until after his death (published 1778 and 1779, respectively), and they still bore neither author's
nor publisher's name. So masterly was Hume in disguising his own views that debate continues to
this day over whether Hume was actually a deist or an atheist. Regardless, in his own time
Hume's alleged atheism caused him to be passed over for many positions.

Hume told his friend Mure of Caldwell of an incident which occasioned his conversion to
Christianity. Passing across the recently drained Nor’ Loch to the New Town of Edinburgh to
supervise the masons building his new house, soon to become No 1 St David Street, he slipped
and fell into the mire. Hume, being then of great bulk, could not regain his feet. Some passing
Newhaven fishwives seeing his plight, but recognising him as the well-known atheist, refused to
rescue him until he became a Christian and had recited The Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. This he
did and was rewarded by being set again on his feet by these brawny women. Hume asserted
thereafter that Edinburgh fishwives were the "most acute theologians he had ever met".[14]

From 1763 to 1765 Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by
Voltaire and lionised by the ladies in society. He made friends with and, later, fell out with
Rousseau. He wrote of his Paris life "I really wish often for the plain roughness of the The Poker
Club of Edinburgh . . . to correct and qualify so much luciousness." For a year from 1767, Hume
held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In 1768 he settled
in Edinburgh. Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (circa 1770) and
from then onwards he gained the recognition that he had craved all his life.

James Boswell visited Hume a few weeks before his death. Hume told him that he sincerely
believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death.[15] This meeting was
also dramatized in semi-fictional form for the BBC by Michael Ignatieff as Dialogue in the Dark.
Hume wrote his own epitaph:"Born 1711, Died [----]. Leaving it to posterity to add the rest." It is
engraved with the year of his death 1776 on the "simple Roman tomb" which he prescribed, and
which stands, as he wished it, on the Eastern slope of the Calton Hill overlooking his home in the
New Town of Edinburgh at No. 1 St David Street.