After Aristotle we have, as regards logic, what the verdict of after
times has rightly characterized as an age of _Epigoni_. So far as the
Aristotelian framework is accepted we meet only minor corrections and
extensions of a formal kind. If there is conscious and purposed
divergence from Aristotle, inquiry moves, on the whole, within the
circle of ideas where Aristotelianism had fought its fight and won its
victory. Where new conceptions emerge, the imperfection of the
instruments, mechanical and methodological, of the sciences renders
them unfruitful, until their rediscovery in a later age. We have
activity without advance, diversity without development. Attempts at
comprehensiveness end in the compromises of eclecticism.
The Peripatetics.
Illustrations are not far to seek. Theophrastus and in general the
elder Peripatetics, before the rise of new schools with new lines of
cleavage and new interests had led to new antagonisms and new
alliances, do not break away from the Aristotelian metaphysic. Their
interests, however, lie in the sublunary sciences in which the
substantive achievement of the school was to be found. With
Theophrastus, accordingly, in his botanical inquiries, for example,
the alternatives of classification, the normal sequence of such and
such a character upon such another, the conclusion of rational
probability, are what counts. It is perhaps not wholly fanciful to
connect with this attitude the fact that Aristotle's pupils dealt with
a surer hand than the master with the conclusions from premises of
unlike modality, and that a formal advance of some significance
attributable to Theophrastus and Eudemus is the doctrine of the
hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms.
The Stoics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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