Why is aristotle know as the founder of logic?

Answer 1

Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs) (384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on diverse subjects, including physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, and biology. Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, is generally considered one of the most influential of ancient Greek philosophers. They transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle founded two of the most important schools of Ancient philosophy.

Although Aristotle wrote dialogues, only fragments of these have survived. The works that have survived are in treatise form and were, for the most part, unpublished texts. These are generally thought to be lecture notes or texts used by his students. Among the most important are Physics, Metaphysics (or Ontology), Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics. These works, although connected in many fundamental ways, differ significantly in both style and substance.

Aristotle was a polymath. He not only studied almost every subject possible at the time, but made significant contributions to most of them. In science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, economics, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics, and zoology. In philosophy, Aristotle wrote on aesthetics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. He also dealt with education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. His combined works practically constitute an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge.

After the death of Plato (347 BC), Aristotle was considered for the position of head of the Academy, but this was eventually awarded to Plato's nephew. Aristotle then went with Xenocrates to the court of Hermias, ruler of Atarneus in Asia Minor. He married Pythias, the niece of Hermias, and they had a daughter. They called her Pythias after her mother. In 344 BC, Hermias was murdered in a rebellion, and Aristotle went with his family to Mytilene. It is also reported that he stopped on Lesbos and briefly conducted biological research. Then, one or two years later, he was summoned to Pella, the Macedonian capital, by King Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor of Alexander the Great, who was then 12.

Plutarch wrote that Aristotle not only imparted to Alexander a knowledge of ethics and politics, but also of the most profound secrets of philosophy. We have much proof that Alexander profited by contact with the philosopher, and that Aristotle made prudent and beneficial use of his influence over the young prince (although Bertrand Russell disputes this). Due to this influence, Alexander provided Aristotle with ample means for the acquisition of books and the pursuit of his scientific investigation.

It is possible that Aristotle also participated in the education of Alexander's boyhood friends, which may have included for example Hephaestion and Harpalus. Aristotle maintained a long correspondence with Hephaestion, eventually collected into a book, unfortunately now lost.

According to sources such as Plutarch and Diogenes, Philip burned down Aristotle's hometown of Stageira during the 340s BC; Aristotle successfully requested that Alexander rebuild it. During his tutorship of Alexander, Aristotle was reportedly considered a second time for leadership of the Academy; his companion Xenocrates was selected instead.

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.

In Aristotle's terminology, the term natural philosophy corresponds to the phenomena of the natural world, which include: motion, light, and the laws of physics. Many centuries later these subjects would become the basis of modern science, as studied through the scientific method. In modern times the term philosophy has come to be more narrowly understood as metaphysics, distinct from empirical study of the natural world via the physical sciences. 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. "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.

Metaphysics, philosophy in the strictest sense, he defines as "the knowledge of immaterial being", and calls it "first philosophy", "the theologic science" or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction". If logic, or, as Aristotle calls it, Analytic, be regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, we have as divisions of Aristotelian philosophy Logic; Theoretical Philosophy, including Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics, Practical Philosophy; and Poetical Philosophy.

Aristotle's conception of logic was the dominant form of logic up until the advances in mathematical logic in the 19th century. Kant himself thought that Aristotle had done everything possible in terms of logic.

Aristotle "says that 'on the subject of reasoning' he 'had nothing else on an earlier date to speak of'" (Bocheński, 1951). 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 (Bocheński, 1951). 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 (Rose, 1968).

What we today call Aristotelian logic, Aristotle himself would have labelled "analytics". The term "logic" he reserved to mean dialectics. Most of Aristotle's work is probably not in its original form, since it was most likely edited by students and later lecturers. The logical works of Aristotle were compiled into six books in about the early 1st century CE:

Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
On Sophistical Refutations
The order of the books (or the teachings from which they are composed) is not certain, but this list was derived from analysis of Aristotle's writings. It goes from the basics, the analysis of simple terms in the Categories, to the study of more complex forms, namely, syllogisms (in the Analytics) and dialetics (in the Topics and Sophistical Refutations). There is one volume of Aristotle's concerning logic not found in the Organon, namely the fourth book of Metaphysics. (Bocheński, 1951).

Aristotle is also the creator of syllogisms with modalities (modal logic). The word modal refers to the word 'modes', explaining the fact that modal logic deals with the modes of truth. Aristotle introduced the qualification of 'necessary' and 'possible' premises. He constructed a logic which helped in the evaluation of truth but which was difficult to interpret. (Rose, 1968).
In the period between his two stints in Athens, between his times at the Academy and the Lyceum, Aristotle conducted most of the scientific thinking and research for which he is now most renowned. In fact, most of Aristotle's life was devoted to the study of the objects of natural science. Aristotle’s Metaphysics contains observations on the nature of numbers but he made no original contributions to Mathematics. He did, however, perform original research in the natural sciences, including: botany, zoology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and meteorology, geometry and several other sciences.

Aristotle's writings on science are largely qualitative, not quantitative. Beginning in the sixteenth century, scientists began applying mathematics to the physical sciences, and Aristotle's work in this area was found to be hopelessly inadequate. His failings were largely down to lacking concepts like mass, velocity, force, and temperature. He had a notion of what speed and temperature was, but no quantative understanding of them. This was partly due to not having basic experimental apparatus, like a clock or thermometer.

His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, but there are some curious errors. For example, in his History of Animals he claimed that human males have more teeth than females. Perhaps he was too busy observing the more interesting aspects of nature to spend a few hours counting teeth. In a similar vein, Galileo showed by simple experiments that Aristotle's theory that the heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect.

Some have alleged that Aristotle regularly started from theory and twisted facts to fit it. For instance he observed living things on earth, in the oceans, and in the air. From this he concluded there must be fire beings living on the moon. This is obviously absurd. In his defence, there are very few passages like this. In many passages Aristotle suggest that facts must be collected before an axiomatized deductive science can be built. But Aristotle never had all the facts, and thought he had facts when he had only falsehoods.

In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving 'laws of the universe' from simple observation and over-stretched reason. Today's scientific method assumes that thinking without sufficient facts often leads people astray, and one must be much stricter than Aristotle was in comparing one's ideas to the actual world through experimentation; only then can one discern if one's hypothesis corresponds to reality.

Aristotle also had some scientific blind spots, the largest being his inability to see the application of mathematics to physics. Aristotle held that physics was about changing objects with a reality of their own, whereas mathematics was about unchanging objects without a reality of their own. In this philosophy, he could not imagine that there was a relationship between them. He also posited a flawed cosmology that we may discern in selections of the Metaphysics. His cosmology would gain much acceptance up until the 1500s. From the 3rd century to the 1500s, the dominant view held that the Earth was the centre of the universe; of course, we now know that the Earth is not even the centre of our own solar system.

Aristotle's scientific shortcomings should not mislead you into forgetting the immense advances that he made in the many fields of science. For instance, he founded logic as a formal science and created foundations to biology that were not superseded for two millennia. Also, he introduced the fundamental notion that nature is composed of things that change and that studying such changes can provide useful knowledge. This made the study of physics, and all other sciences, respectable. This observation, though, goes beyond physics and is really the subject matter of metaphysics.

Answer 2

I'm not sure -- especially considering he was singlehandedly responsible for stalling scientific progress for over a thousand years! He stated that simply thinking about things was sufficient, and that there was no need to experiment; this is completely fallacious as anyone who understands physics will tell you.

Answer 3

His writings on the subject is the earliest that we currently have.