Crotchety_Crank

Thanks for the reply.  I'll try to reply comprehensively, sorry if I miss anything.  To start with - Aristotle.

What Aristotle Taught

Was Aristotle not an originator of a school of syllogistic logic that treated concepts somewhat similarly to the logical positivists?  

I'm going to break this into two parts - the part about logic, and the part about concepts.  Logic first.  Aristotle indeed wrote six works on logic and reasoning, which are most often collectively called the Organon.  Most of it is developing a valid system of syllogistic logic.  The really nice part about syllogistic logic is that correct syllogisms are indisputably valid (but not indisputably sound).  Aristotle is totally clear about this.... (read 2406 more words →)

Thanks, I picked the name myself.  This is a new account because I haven't commented before, but I'm long familiar with this community and its thought - and its norms.  Given those norms, I probably should have cooled off a bit before posting that comment.  Let me try again.  I apologize in advance for the length of the below, but charity takes more work and therefore more words.

Fairness to the Ancients

I think we're talking past one another.  Plato was definitely a Platonist, and he definitely employed counterfactual reasoning.  Congratulations to your Ancient Phil professor on achieving tenure; I studied under others (I won't say who or where for privacy reasons), and they... (read 745 more words →)

I wonder if anyone ever reads the ancients anymore. Because around here I frequently hear the word "Platonic", applied to a naive straw man of formalism that I'm not sure anyone ever believed, let alone Plato's character of Socrates. That caricature has its genesis in "A human's guide to words", which characterizes it by relying on (of all things) Aristotelean syllogism. It should go without saying that this is confused.  

It irks me when supposed philosophers so badly misunderstand the history of their own field, and diagnose and psychologize philosophy's past with the ailment of "aprioristically" and simplistically reasoning based on "necessary and sufficient conditions" alone.  Here is Aristotle, in the preface... (read 484 more words →)