Book Description

Aristotle recorded his intention to discuss hypothetical syllogistic fully ('An. pr.' 50a39), but no such treatment by him has been available since at least 200 AD, if ever it even existed. The contributions of his successor Theophrastus have also perished, as have those of Aristotle's followers of the subsequent few centuries. Furthermore, almost all of the surviving sources, especially the Greek commentators and Boethius, did not report hypothetical syllogistic accurately. Rather, they conflated it with Stoic logic, which it resembles in some respects, but from which it is significantly different. Modern scholars, who have not appreciated the nature or extent of this conflation, have unintentionally perpetuated the problem. As a result, the original form of hypothetical syllogistic has been misunderstood, and part of the influence of Stoic logic in late antiquity has remained unclear. This thesis is an account of the conflation of hypothetical syllogistic and Stoic logic. The first chapter is a study of Aristotle's remarks on hypothetical syllogistic, which suggest that it was not a sentential logic such as the Stoics would develop. The second chapter details the conflation as it appears in the Greek commentaries on Aristotle, which consists principally in confusing the original Peripatetic division of hypothetical statements and syllogisms, whose criteria are semantic, with the Stoic division of complex propositions and inference schemata, whose criteria are syntactic. The third and fourth chapters focus on Boethius's 'On hypothetical syllogisms' and ' On Cicero'''s Topics', in which even further conflation demonstrates that hypothetical syllogistic and Stoic logic had completely ceased to retain their distinct natures by the end of antiquity.