Most people probably learned about the first figure syllogism by seeing an example of it that was immediately drained into symbolic form: A is B, C is A, so C is B. Soon, the “is” is dropped as well. The syllogism becomes a sort of logarithm: AB x CA= CB. The emphasis of the syllogism becomes “putting the terms in the right slots”; or again, logic becomes a sort of function machine a la mathematics.
With this sort of account of the first figure syllogism, it is jarring to read Aristotle’s account of it:
Whenever three terms are so related to one another that the last is contained in the middle as in a whole, and the middle is either contained in, or excluded from, the first as in or from a whole, the extremes must be related by a perfect syllogism. Prior Analytics, Bk. 1 chap. 3
For Aristotle, the emphasis is on seeing how terms are contained by one another as parts in a whole. The “whole” here in question is the universal or confused whole, which Aristotle calls the principle of all our knowledge in Physics Bk. 1 chap 1. Tis explains the peculiar order Aristotle gives the terms. The term Aristotle calls the “first” is in fact the second term in the “slot theory” of the syllogism, but Aristotle calls it first because it is the most universal term, and terms are ordered by their universality. The term Aristotle calls “last” is so called for being the least universal.
Aristotle is not being obscurantist or pedantic- he wants you to see syllogisms like this. For Aristotle, the syllogism is a cause of knowledge, and knowledge is caused by moving from the confused whole to the distinct parts. Aristotle’s logic seeks to order things that are withinI you. As he himself says, science is primarily interior discourse.
Aristotle’s logic has radically different aims than symbolic logic, or even the “formal Logic” that is called Aristotelian. One way to see this is in the preference of syllogisms. For the one who thinks in terms of symbols or term placement, the hypothetical syllogism (if A then B) is ideal because of its simplicity; but for Aristotle the hypothetical syllogism starts halfway by presupposing a more universal rule that accounts for the truth of the consequence.
Martin Cothran said,
August 8, 2008 at 7:55 am
Right. I never could get why Aristotle, instead of saying “A is B”, said something more like, “B is predicated of A” until it was pointed out to me by Lloyd Newton at Benedictine College that that better preserves the logical order of his thought in the same way you are pointing out here. Good post.