The way in which logical doctrine is developed in the Aristotelian
treatises fits in with this view. Doubtless what we have is in the main
a reflex of the heuristic character of Aristotle's own work as pioneer.
But it at least satisfies the requirement that the inquiry shall carry
the plain man along with it. Actual modes of expression are shown to
embody distinctions which average intelligence can easily recognize and
will readily acknowledge, though they may tend by progressive
rectification fundamentally to modify the assumption natural to the
level of thought from which he begins. Thus we start[34] from the point
of view of a world of separate persons and things, in which thought
mirrors these concrete realities, taken as ultimate subjects of
predicates. It is a world of communication of thought, where persons as
thinkers need to utter in language truths objectively valid for the
_mundus communis_. In these truths predicates are accepted or rejected
by subjects, and therefore depend on the reflection of fact in [Greek:
logoi] (propositions). These are combinatory of parts, attaching or
detaching predicates, and so involving subject, predicate and
copula.[35] At this stage we are as much concerned with speech-forms as
the thought-forms of which they are conventional symbols, with Plato's
analysis, for instance, into a noun and a verb, whose connotation of
time is as yet a difficulty. The universal of this stage is the
universal of fact, what is recognized as predicable of a plurality of
subjects. The dialectical doctrine of judgment as the declaration of one
member of a disjunction by contradiction, which is later so important,
is struggling with one of its initial difficulties,[36] viz. the
contingency of particular events future, the solution of which remains
imperfect.[37]
The Categories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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