Aristotle Logic Quotes

Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.

Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That’s why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.

There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and

For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways?

Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious...

Further, the orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments;

It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.

In one of Plato's seminars a young man with a rural accent stood up one day and said Plato's philosophy was nonsense. You can have ideas that are neither real nor permanent. They can be mere fleeting fantasies. Plato evicted the student, whose name was Aristotle. Unlike Plato, Aristotle was not one of the gilded youth of Athenian society. His social background was solid middle class. But such was the encyclopedic knowledge he came to exhibit, and his skill in logical argument, that in time Aristotle gained rich benefactors, including the king of Macedonia who hired Aristotle to tutor his young son, later known as Alexander the Great.

Intuition is a capacity of our heart. Our heart is the door to allowing Existence to guide us, instead of being directed by our ideas, desires and expectations. Since the days of Aristotle’s, we have been taught that logic is the only way to reach a solution. But while logic works in a step-by-step-process to reach a solution, intuition simply takes a quantum leap to a solution without any intermediate steps.

Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.

memories of emotional events are stamped on running water

Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship, and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument.

Dialectic as a whole, or of one of its parts, to consider every kind of syllogism in a similar manner, it is clear that he who is most capable of examining the matter and forms of a syllogism will be in the highest degree a master of rhetorical argument, if to this he adds a knowledge of the subjects with which enthymemes deal and the differences between them and logical syllogisms.

Modern logicians do not appeal to Aristotle’s authority in logic. They accept some of his logical claims and reject others, on their own merits. They have found Aristotle’s initial characterizations of truth and falsity an appropriate starting point for fruitful investigation. For logical purposes, there is no serious alternative to them.

what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and,

Ultimately Russell himself admitted that he made his greatest efforts in the field of traditional philosophy – in epistemology, the search for the ultimate grounds of our knowledge about the world. How can we be certain that what we claim to know is true? Where lies the certainty in our experience of the world? Can even the most precise knowledge – such as mathematics – be said to rest on any sure logical foundation? These were the questions that Russell sought to answer during the periods of his most profound philosophical thinking. They have remained the perennial questions of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hume, and Kant, to Russell and Wittgenstein.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.

By the end of the eleventh century,” Edmond said, “the greatest intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali—now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history—wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ‘the philosophy of the devil.

The necessity of an enumeration of Existences, as the basis of Logic, did not escape the attention of the schoolmen, and of their master Aristotle, the most comprehensive, if not also the most sagacious, of the ancient philosophers.

Under Aristotle the “Reader,” whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As “the system.

For what [Aristotle] had done was to gather together all the knowledge of his time. He wrote about the natural sciences – the stars, animals and plants; about history and people living together in a state – what we call politics; about the right way to reason – logic; and the right way to behave – ethics.

This, until a better can be suggested, may serve as a substitute for the Categories of Aristotle considered as a classification of Existences. The practical application of it will appear when we commence the inquiry into the Import of Propositions; in other words, when we inquire what it is which the mind actually believes, when it gives what is called its assent to a proposition.

In the history of philosophy, the term “rationalism” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, it signifies an unbreached commitment to reasoned thought in contrast to any irrationalist rejection of the mind. In this sense, Aristotle and Ayn Rand are preeminent rationalists, opposed to any form of unreason, including faith. In a narrower sense, however, rationalism contrasts with empiricism as regards the false dichotomy between commitment to so-called “pure” reason (i.e., reason detached from perceptual reality) and an exclusive reliance on sense experience (i.e., observation without inference therefrom). Rationalism, in this sense, is a commitment to reason construed as logical deduction from non-observational starting points, and a distrust of sense experience (e.g., the method of Descartes). Empiricism, according to this mistaken dichotomy, is a belief that sense experience provides factual knowledge, but any inference beyond observation is a mere manipulation of words or verbal symbols (e.g., the approach of Hume). Both Aristotle and Ayn Rand reject such a false dichotomy between reason and sense experience; neither are rationalists in this narrow sense. Theology is the purest expression of rationalism in the sense of proceeding by logical deduction from premises ungrounded in observable fact—deduction without reference to reality. The so-called “thinking” involved here is purely formal, observationally baseless, devoid of facts, cut off from reality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was history’s foremost expert regarding the field of “angelology.” No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

St. Thomas himself recalls the saying of Aristotle that “the thing is the whiter, the less it is mixed with black,”45 without mentioning, however, that the reverse proposition: “the thing is the blacker, the less it is mixed with white,” not only has the same validity as the first but is also its logical equivalent. He might also have mentioned that not only darkness is known through light, but that, conversely, light is known through darkness.

The grammar of language locks us into certain forms of logic and ways of thinking. As the writer Sidney Hook put it, “When Aristotle drew up his table of categories which to him represented the grammar of existence, he was really projecting the grammar of the Greek language on the cosmos.” Linguists have enumerated the high number of concepts that have no particular word to describe them in the English language. If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them.

Men become attached to certain particular sciences and speculations, either because they fancy themselves the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have bestowed the greatest pains upon them and become most habituated to them. But men of this kind, if they betake themselves to philosophy and contemplation of a general character, distort and color them in obedience to their former fancies; a thing especially to be noticed in Aristotle, who made his natural philosophy a mere bond servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well-nigh useless.

Glad that you thus continue your resolve To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy Only, good master, while we do admire This virtue and this moral discipline, Let's be no Stoics nor no stocks, I pray, Or so devote to Aristotle's checks As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured. Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, And practise rhetoric in your common talk, Music and poesy use to quicken you, The mathematics and the metaphysics Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en. In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

The question I hoped to answer,was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all... that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.

It was, as Berlin remembered it: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scholar Erasmus played around with it, 3 and Berlin couldn’t help doing the same. Might it become a scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust would all have been hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce were obviously foxes. So was Berlin, who distrusted most big things—like logical positivism—but felt fully at ease with smaller ones. 4 Diverted by World War II, Berlin didn’t return to his quadrupeds until 1951, when he used them to frame an essay he was preparing on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. It appeared two years later as a short book, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.” It might even reflect “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.

Another misconception is that we don’t need to worry about the local supply of insects because insects are everywhere all the time. If this is true, where do all those insects come from and what do they eat? Do they just appear out of nowhere? Is Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation alive and well in our popular culture? I hope not. The fact is that all insects, every last one of them, are produced directly or indirectly by plants. They either eat some plant part, or they eat another animal that ate some plant part. What follows logically, then, is that when we reduce the amount of plants in any given place, we reduce the diversity and abundance of insects. Alarming headlines from around the world are reminding us of the critical linkage between plants and insects; we have removed more than half of the forests on earth and, not surprisingly, insect populations have declined globally by at least 45% since 1979

In reading any important philosopher, but most of all in reading Aristotle, it is necessary to study him in two ways; with reference to his predecessors, and with reference to his successors. In the former aspect, Aristotle's merits are enormous; in the latter, his demerits are equally enormous. For his demerits, however, his successors are more responsible than he is. He came at the end of the creative period of Greek thought, and after his death it was two thousand years before the world produced any philosopher who would be regarded as approximately his equal. Towards the end of this long period his authority had become almost as unquestioned as the Church, and in science, as well as in philosophy, had become a serious obstacle to progress. Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, almost every serious intellectual advance had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine; in logic, this is still true at the present day. But it would have been at least as disastrous if any of his predecessors (except perhaps Democritus) had acquired equal authority.

The story of The Rape of the Lock, sylphs and all, could have been told, though not so effectively, in prose. The Odyssey and the Comedy have something to say that could have been said well, though not equally well, without verse. Most of the qualities Aristotle demands of a tragedy could occur in a prose play. Poetry and prose, however different in language, overlapped, almost coincided, in content. But modern poetry, if it ‘says’ anything at all, if it aspires to ‘mean’ as well as to ‘be’, says what prose could not say in any fashion. To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; ‘purer’ in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can’t do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do. Unfortunately, but inevitably, this process is accompanied by a steady diminution in the number of its readers. Some have blamed the poets for this, and some the people. I am not sure that there need be any question of blame. The more any instrument is refined and perfected for some particular function, the fewer those who have the skill, or the occasion, to handle it must of course become. Many use ordinary knives and few use surgeons’ scalpels. The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. The explication of poetry is already well entrenched as a scholastic and academic exercise. The intention to keep it there, to make proficiency in it the indispensable qualification for white-collared jobs, and thus to secure for poets and their explicators a large and permanent (because a conscript) audience, is avowed. It may possibly succeed. Without coming home any more than it now does to the ‘business and bosoms’ of most men, poetry may, in this fashion, reign for a millennium; providing material for the explication which teachers will praise as an incomparable discipline and pupils will accept as a necessary moyen de parvenir. But this is speculation.

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as [James] Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.)

If my views were generally judged to be paradoxical when they made their appearance, some of them are commonplace today; others bid fair to become so. Let us admit that they could not at first be accepted. It would have meant tearing oneself away from deeply-rooted habits, veritable extensions of nature. All our ways of speaking, thinking, perceiving imply in effect that immobility and immutability are there by right, that movement and change are superadded, like accidents, to things which, by themselves, do not move and, in themselves, do not change. The representation of change is that of qualities or states, which supposedly follow one another in a substance. Each of these qualities, each of these states would be something stable, change being made of their succession: as for substance, whose role is to support the states and qualities which succeed one another, it would be stability itself. Such is the logic immanent in our languages and formulated once and for all by Aristotle: the intelligence has as its essence to judge, and judgment operates by the attribution of a predicate to a subject. The subject, by the sole fact of being named, is defined as invariable; the variation will reside in the diversity of the states that one will affirm concerning it, one after another.

Because Aristotle’s was the accepted lens on the universe, centuries of medieval scientists and thinkers went to great lengths to make epicycles work. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, with one simple but profound observation, that Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus reframed our view of the universe. The planets revolved not around the earth, but around the sun. Finally, understanding that provided a foundation for some of the most important advances in history and the foundation for modern astronomy and calculus. Of course, it took eighteen centuries for someone like Copernicus to see and articulate the flaws in Aristotle’s logic. And even he died without knowing that the world would accept he was right. Changing a well-established view of the world rarely happens overnight—and even when it happens, it still takes time to refine and perfect the right new perspective. In the world of innovation, many companies are stuck in a world of creating “epicycles”: elaborate approximations, estimations, and extrapolations. Because we gather, fine-tune, and cross-reference all manner of data, it seems like we should be getting better and better at predicting success. But if we fail to understand why customers make the choices they make, we’re just getting better and better at a fundamentally flawed process. Without the right understanding of the causal mechanism at the center of the innovation universe, companies are trying to make sense of the universe revolving around the earth. They’re forced to rely on an array of borrowed best practices, probabilistic tools, and tips and tricks that have worked for other companies, but which can’t guarantee success. As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction—just a few minutes of arc—but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything.

The earliest medieval logical curriculum, studied from the time of Alcuin’s On Dialectic (late 780s?) until the late tenth century, was based mainly on the accounts of logic in the encyclopedias of Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville and Martianus Capella, together with Apuleius’s Periermenias (an account of basic Aristotelian syllogistic) and the Ten Categories, a paraphrase-commentary of Aristotle’s Categories. The last of these was written in the circle of Themistius, but attributed in the Middle Ages to Augustine. This misattribution points to one of the reasons why logic had such a large place in early medieval education: it was seen as indispensable in theological discussion, both because it provided a way of posing fundamental questions about God and his relation to his creation, and because it furnished a formidable argumentative weapon in controversy.

But I had learned how to hide what I felt. No that’s no true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt

¿Todos los chicos se sentían solos? El sol de verano no estaba hecho para chicos como yo. Los chicos como yo pertenecíamos a la lluvia.

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us. In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept "reality," for ourselves.?--To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being--which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.

I don't get you." "I don't get me either.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand who I am.

In Zadeh’s fuzzy logic, we can not only estimate degrees of probability a la Korzybski but also degrees of presence or remaining presence. In other words, where Aristotle only lets us say “The U.S. Senate consists of imbeciles” or “The U.S. Senate does not consist of imbeciles,” and von Neumann and Korzybski allow us to estimate the probability that the Senate consists of imbeciles, Zadeh’s math allows us, if we know the facts, to state precisely how many imbeciles we will find present among the 100 persons in the Senate . . . 1, 10, 25, 53, 90 or whatever . . .

THE GREEK word for disciple, mathetes, was a very meaningful word in the Greek world. Plato developed a form of thinking or a philosophy of life that separated the physical and spiritual realm. This disconnection between the physical and spiritual still affects our thinking today, as is apparent when we reference the secular versus the sacred. That form of thinking that Plato developed is called Platonic thought. Plato had a follower named Aristotle. Aristotle was a follower of Plato. He was a student and he studied the Platonic philosophy. Aristotle, Plato’s student, developed schools called academies, where he would train the next generation in Plato’s thinking. So Aristotle, Plato’s student, bought into the worldview of Plato, and began developing schools to train other students in this thinking of Plato. Part of this organized approach by Aristotle is known as Aristotelian logic. Aristotle systematized and organized the thinking of Plato and made it transferable. Out of these schools there were birthed men and women who now went into the marketplace with this Platonic worldview. They became doctors and lawyers and teachers, but they had this worldview. In the meantime, Rome overtook Greece. The big military machine of Rome defeated Greece and Greece was now a defeated nation and now being occupied by Roman power. But there was a problem in Rome. The folks who had been trained in Greece with the thinking of Plato and the system of Aristotle were infiltrating Roman culture. We call it the Hellenization of the Romans. Rome was being “Greek-enized,” even though it was the prominent military power. The Greek influence permeated the Roman culture because of the power of discipleship. This is the point of discipleship. When Jesus discussed discipleship, it was in the cultural context of Greek culture influencing the Roman Empire through the power of discipleship. Jesus Christ takes the concept of discipleship and intimates, “I’m looking for a generation of followers who are so saturated in My thinking, My worldview, and My orientation that when integrated into the culture in which they are situated, the culture will have to live with the influence of Jesus Christ, who permeates the culture.

Induction is the process of inferring generalizations from particular instances. The complementary process of applying generalizations to new instances is deduction. The theory of deductive reasoning was developed by Aristotle more than two millennia ago. This crucial achievement was a start toward understanding and validating knowledge, but it was only a start. Deduction presupposes induction; one cannot apply what one does not know or cannot conceive. The primary process of gaining knowledge that goes beyond perceptual data is induction. Generalization—the inference from some members of a class to all—is the essence of human cognition.

Goals. What does the persuader want to get out of the argument? Is she trying to change the audience’s mood or mind, or does she want it to do something? Is she fixing blame, bringing a tribe together with values speech, or talking about a decision? Ethos, pathos, logos. Which appeal does she emphasize—character, emotion, or logic? Kairos. Is her timing right? Is she using the right medium?

So it is surely licit to ask what Thomas Aquinas would do if he were alive today; but we have to answer that, in any case, he would not write another Summa Theologica. He would come to terms with Marxism, with the physics of relativity, with formal logic, with existentialism and phenomenology. He would comment not on Aristotle, but on Marx and Freud. Then he would change his method of argumentation, which would become a bit less harmonious and conciliatory. And finally he would realize that one cannot and must not work out a definitive, concluded system, like a piece of architecture, but a sort of mobile system, a loose-leaf Summa, because in his encyclopedia of the sciences the notion of historical temporariness would have entered. I can’t say whether he would still be a Christian. But let’s say he would be. I know for sure that he would take part in the celebrations of his anniversary only to remind us that it is not a question of deciding how still to use what he thought, but to think new things. Or at least to learn from him how you can think cleanly, like a man of your own time. After which I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. 

I believe the best reason we can give to prove that other men are living and intelligent is that their words and actions indicate like powers of understanding as we are conscious of in ourselves. The very same argument applied to the works of nature leads us to conclude that there is an intelligent Author of nature, and appears equally strong and obvious in the last case as in the first; so that it may be doubted whether men, by the mere exercise of reasoning, might not as soon discover the existence of a Deity as that other men have life and intelligence.

Aristotle observed, pure logic won’t suffice on its own because some links in the chain are missing or uncertain. But he offered the advice that “we should also base our arguments upon probabilities as well as upon certainties,” 2 and this could still constitute an appeal to good reason, since “the true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.” 3

The first text book on the subject was Aristotle's Rhetoric which was written sometime between 322 and 320 B.C. In this book Aristotle defined rhetorical discourse "as the art of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given case." During the Roman period great orators like Cicero and Quintilion also wrote some important books on the subject. They also agreed with Aristotle and defined rhetoric as the art of persuading an audience. At first it also included logic, that is, valid reasoning and the tricks or devices used in argument so as to produce intellectual and emotional effect on the audience in order to make them veer round the speaker's point of view. But today it means mostly the tricks.

One might think that after this trenchant diagnosis of the radical dualism in human thinking, Huxley would urge us to take truth seriously and lean against any way in which we may be tempted to rationalize our needs—as Plato and Aristotle would have recommended. Instead, bizarrely, he goes on to take the very approach he was attacking. He freely admits that he “took it for granted” that the world had no meaning, but he did not discover it, he decided it. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.”7 His philosophy of meaninglessness was far from disinterested. And the reason? “We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”8 This admission is extraordinary. To be sure, Huxley and his fellow members of the Garsington Circle near Oxford were not like the Marquis de Sade, who used the philosophy of meaninglessness to justify cruelty, rape and murder. But Huxley’s logic is no different. He too reached his view of the world for nonintellectual reasons: “It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence.” After all, he continues in this public confessional, “The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants, or why his friends should seize political power and govern in a way they find most advantageous to themselves.”9 The eminent contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is equally candid. He admits that his deepest objection to Christian faith stems not from philosophy but fear. I am talking about something much deeper—namely the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.10 At least there is no pretense in such confessions. As Pascal wrote long ago, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”11 In Huxley’s case there is no clearer confession of what Ludwig Feuerbach called “projection,” Friedrich Nietzsche called the “will to power,” Sigmund Freud called “rationalization,” Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” and the sociologists of knowledge call “ideology”—a set of intellectual ideas that serve as social weapons for his and his friends’ interests. Unwittingly, this scion of the Enlightenment pleads guilty on every count, but rather than viewing it as a confession, Huxley trumpets his position proudly as a manifesto. “For myself, no doubt, as for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.”12 Truth

In book two of his Rhetoric,2 Aristotle identified and explained three means of persuasion that a speaker may use: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is the logical argumentation and patterns of reasoning used to effect persuasion. Pathos includes the emotional involvement of both the speaker and the audience as they achieve persuasion. Ethos refers to the character of the speaker

The ancient Romans would call the Ironman’s brand appeal argumentum a fortiori, “argument from strength.” Its logic goes like this: if something works the hard way, it’s more likely to work the easy way. Advertisers favor the argument from strength. Years ago, Life cereal ran an ad with little Mikey the fussy eater. His two older brothers tested the cereal on him, figuring that if Mikey liked it, anybody would. And he liked it! An argumentum a fortiori cereal ad.

He, too, was unable to escape the yearning for changelessness in a world of change, which Plato had so elegantly embodied in his theory of forms. The concluding Book of his Physics aims to show that motion, like time, "always was and always will be"-"an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things." Which set the stage for Aristotle's God-the Unmoved Mover. This may have been as much a deference to common sense-the prevalent views of his community-as to logic or evidence. The Unmoved Mover was his name for the most divine being accessible to man. Since the activity of God was thought, it was also man's highest faculty. "That which is capable of receiving the object of thought, is mind, and it is active when it possesses it. This activity therefore rather than the capability appears as the divine element in mind, and contemplation the pleasantest and best activity. If then God is for ever in that good state which we reach occasionally it is a wonderful thing-if in a better state, more wonderful still. Yet it is so. Life too he has, for the activity of the mind is life, and he is that activity. His essential activity is his life, the best life and eternal. We say then that God is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life. That is God." Even in describing the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle makes activity his ideal.

Non-Euclidean' became a byword for non-absolute knowledge. It also served to illustrate most vividly the gap between mathematics and the natural world. Mathematics was much bigger than physical reality. There were mathematical systems that described aspects of Nature, but there were others that did not. Later, mathematicians would use these discoveries about geometry to discover that there were other logics as well. Aristotle's system was, like Euclid's, just one of many possibilities. Even the concept of truth was not absolute. What is false in one logical system can be true in another. In Euclid's geometry of flat surfaces, parallel lines never meet, but on curved surfaces they can. These discoveries revealed the difference between mathematics and science. Mathematics was something bigger than science, requiring only self-consistency to be valid. It contained all possible patterns of logic. Some of those patterns were followed by parts of Nature; others were not. Mathematics was open-ended, uncompleteable, infinite; the physical universe was smaller.

One may guess that the commissioning of this work [a logical textbook and translation into Arabic of Aristotle and Porphyry] must have come from a wish to have in Arabic what students were reading in the Christian schools as part of their general education,28 and that somehow this wish was related to the social developments at the very beginning of the Abbasid dynasty – or perhaps, more specifically, to the increased interest in the theological implications of the grammar of statements, the structure and logic of language, and consequent meaning, issues manifestly treated in the first works of the Organon.29

That Logic was invented by a philosopher is a significant fact. Many a profession could claim the indispensability of clear thinking for sound practice. So why was logic not invented by an admiral or a general, or by a physician or a physicist? Why indeed was logic not invented by a mathematician: why is Aristotle not the Gottlob Frege of the ancient world? Logos is nothing if not a corrective to common sense. Logos has an inherent obligation to surprise. It began with the brilliant speculations of the Pythagoreans-- the original neopythagoreans, as one wag has put it--with regard to a number theoretic ontology. Apart from the physicists, the great majority of influential practitioners of logos before Plato allowed logos to operate at two removes from common sense. The first was the remove at which speculative science itself would achieve a degree of theoretical maturity. But the second remove was from science itself. The first philosophers were unique among the practitioners of logos in that they created a crisis for logos. In the hands of the sophists, philosophy had become its own unique problem. It was unable to contain the unbridled argumentative and discursive fire-power of logos. In fact, philosophy has had this same sort of problem--the problem of trying to salvage itself from its excesses--off and on ever since. Thus, logic was invented by a philosopher because it was a philosopher who knew best the pathological problematic that philosophy had itself created. -Eds. Dov Gabbay & John Woods. (2004) John Woods & Andrew Irvine. "Aristotle's Early Logic." Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 1: Greek and Indian Logic. PP. 27-100.

Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity? In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God. The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires. This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality. If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason. If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical

But is Christian faith the place to turn for logic? Is not logic the domain of scholars and philosophers? The British philosopher John Locke condemns this common misconception: “God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.”[2] In other words, Locke recognized that logic existed and people reasoned and used the critical faculties of their minds before any philosopher came along to teach about it. God created logic and reasoning as he created man, and he created it for man, and therefore, we should find it reasonable that God’s Word has something to say—if not a lot to say—about logic, rationality, and good judgment.

Good master, while we do admire This virtue and this moral discipline, Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray, Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured. 5 Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, And practice rhetoric in your common talk. Music and poesy use to quicken you; The mathematics and the metaphysics, Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. 10 No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. In brief, sir, study what you most affect. —TRANIO, The Taming of the Shrew, 1.1.29–40 In other words: Listen, boss. We all think highly of ethics and morality. But—please—let’s not eliminate fun altogether, or turn ourselves into stuffed shirts. Let’s not dedicate ourselves to a life of restraint and throw away pleasure altogether. (Let’s not get all hung up with that stickler Aristotle about stuff like right and wrong, and throw Ovid’s stories about people who get naked right out the window.) Work on your analytical skills by figuring out how to split the check. Use linguistic theory in your everyday chitchat. By all means listen to music and read poetry, but purely for your enjoyment. As for math and philosophy, get involved in that stuff only when you’re really in the mood. You can’t learn anything if you’re miserable. Here’s my point: as far as study goes, stick to the subjects you like.

Despite the emphasis that the Greeks placed on theory, they had little interest in applying it to any kind of technology that would have changed their views of the manageability of the future. When Archimedes invented the lever, he claimed that he could move the earth if only he could find a place to stand. But apparently he gave no thought to changing it. The daily life of the Greeks, and their standard of living, were much the same as the way that their forebears had subsisted for thousands of years. They hunted, fished, grew crops, bore children, and used architectural techniques that were only variations on themes developed much earlier in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and in Egypt. Genuflection before the winds was the only form of risk management that caught their attention: their poets and dramatists sing repeatedly of their dependence on the winds, and beloved children were sacrificed to appease the winds. Most important, the Greeks lacked a numbering system that would have enabled them to calculate instead of just recording the results of their activities.9 I do not mean to suggest that the Greeks gave no thought to the nature of probability. The ancient Greek word εικος (eikos), which meant plausible or probable, had the same sense as the modern concept of probability: “to be expected with some degree of certainty.” Socrates defines εικος as “likeness to truth.”10 Socrates’ definition reveals a subtle point of great importance. Likeness to truth is not the same thing as truth. Truth to the Greeks was only what could be proved by logic and axioms. Their insistence on proof set truth in direct contrast to empirical experimentation. For example, in Phaedo, Simmias points out to Socrates that “the proposition that the soul is in harmony has not been demonstrated at all but rests only on probability.” Aristotle complains about philosophers who, “. . . while they speak plausibly, . . . do not speak what is true.” Elsewhere, Socrates anticipates Aristotle when he declares that a “mathematician who argues from probabilities in geometry is not worth an ace.”11 For another thousand years, thinking about games and playing them remained separate activities.

I refer to a fundamental difference in the religious attitude between the East (China and India) and the West; this difference can be expressed in terms of logical concepts. Since Aristotle, the Western world has followed the logical principles of Aristotelian philosophy. This logic is based on the law of identity which states that A is A, the law of contradiction (A is not non-A) and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A). Aristotle explains his position very clearly in the following sentence: 'It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect; and whatever other distinctions we might add to meet dialectical objections, let them be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles...' This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be 'natural' and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.) In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described by Lao-tse. 'Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical.' And by Chuang-tzu: 'That which is one is one. That which. is not-one, is also one.' These formulations of paradoxical logic are positive: it is and it is not. Another formulation is negative: it is neither this nor that. The former expression of thought we find in Taoistic thought, in Heraclitus and again in Hegelian dialectics; the latter formulation is frequent in Indian philosophy. Although it would transcend the scope of this book to give a more detailed description of the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic, I shall mention a few illustrations in order to make the principle more understandable. Paradoxical logic in Western thought has its earliest philosophical expression in Heraclitus philosophy. He assumes the conflict between opposites is the basis of all existence. 'They do not understand', he says, 'that the all-One, conflicting in itself, is identical with itself: conflicting harmony as in the bow and in the lyre.' Or still more clearly: 'We go into the same river, and yet not in the same; it is we and it is not we.' Or 'One and the same manifests itself in things as living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old.

The only religion that could ever be taken seriously is rationalism religion. The likes of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Godel have done the hard work necessary to make such a religion viable. Wouldn't you want a religion that every logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist on earth could embrace? In fact, that religion already exists. It's called ontological mathematics, predicated on the principle of sufficient reason and Occam's razor. It constitutes a coherent, holistic, a priori, rationalist, analytic, deductive religion, metaphysics and physics. Ontological mathematics explains all.

Anselm said I must believe so that I can understand. Abelard now reversed the formula: I must understand so that I can believe. Faith without reason was merely supposition, an opinion or guesstimate (aestimatio). Abelard’s most famous work, Sic et Non, compared 150 passages from Scripture and the Church Fathers that contradicted one another. The only way to sort out the mess, Abelard was saying, was through reason and logic. The only way Christianity could make itself a believable faith was by responding to our natural inclination to question its foundations.

As another brilliant logician, Bertrand Russell, pointed out, Abelard tended to overrate the value of Aristotelian logic and of deduction as the only path to truth. Abelard had no interest in the one sphere where inductive reasoning is most important to yielding new knowledge, namely science.35 Aristotle’s writings on that subject were still unavailable to him. Reason for Abelard and his followers was a tool for understanding what was already known, especially about God and the Bible, not opening new vistas for human investigation.

saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard’s Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle’s logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

Aristotle’s logic grew out of Plato’s dialectic, that relentless process of “asking questions and giving answers, affirming and denying” that Socrates had said was necessary to arrive at truth.12 But how does the process really work? Plato and his Neoplatonist followers tended to treat dialectic as a rather mysterious discipline, an inward turning of the soul that allowed it to join up with a transcendent and abstract reality. Aristotle, by contrast, set out to dispel the mystery by bringing logic down to earth. Finding out how one true assertion (all human beings die) leads to another (someday I will die) turned out to be a straightforward process based on a set of rules: the rules of inference.

By contrast, inductive logic usually (though not always) goes from the lesser to the greater. “I have five friends who have white beards; all five are over fifty years of age; therefore all men with white beards are over fifty years of age.

Inductive logic offers a source of new knowledge, based on empirical observation. Aristotle recognized the value of induction; his own sciences were founded on it.13 Still, his real focus was always the logic of deduction.

In effect, Aristotle’s logic offered the possibility of creating a universally true science out of anything—or of deconstructing claims of being a science.

Thanks to Boethius, Aristotle’s logic was now available to apply the same test to Christianity’s weightiest assertions about God, heaven and hell, and the Church’s most cherished views about human beings and nature.

was Gerbert who made Boethius “the schoolmaster of medieval Europe” and made Aristotle’s logic the centerpiece of an education based on the seven liberal arts.15 The idea of the “liberal arts” (so called because it was the education fit for liberi, or free men, as opposed to slaves) was a late Roman invention.c16

Gerbert’s first loves were the subjects of the trivium, especially rhetoric and logic. His insistence that students learn the rules of logic before embarking on anything else made Aristotle the founder of the medieval university curriculum.18

Anyone who failed to apply the test of reasoned logic to the assertions of religious dogma was denying his own nature, Berengar said, “for it is by his reason that man resembles God.

But Aristotle held a deeper interest for Boethius. With the knowledge of Greek steadily disappearing from western Europe, the need for a Latin version of Aristotle seemed more urgent. In fact, Boethius made it his life’s work. “I wish to translate the whole work of Aristotle,” Boethius wrote when he turned thirty. “Everything Aristotle wrote on the difficult art of logic, on the important realm of moral experience, and on the exact comprehension of natural objects, I shall translate in the correct order.”9 Boethius never finished the mammoth project he had set for himself (prison and death also interrupted his plans to translate Plato’s dialogues). Aristotle’s writings on politics, ethics, and rhetoric, along with his central work, the Metaphysics, had to wait another six centuries before they saw the light of day in the West.

I am not deliberately avoiding your question, General, only seeking a true answer. You ask if I am educated. Who knows what an edudated man is? My brain has been enriched with the logic of Aristotle, yet I know not how to milk a goat. I am acquaintanted with the science of Euclid, yet I cannot find a well or sail a vessel. I am familiar with Platonic philosophy, but I cannot build anything durable. Obviously I am an ignorant man.

Wilder Penfield concluded that the intellect and the will are not from the brain. They are from the mind. And that means that the mind can exist without the brain, without the body. It can exist non-locally, as a disembodied, out-of-body mind. And, in that state, it can be intellectual, conscious, and exercise its will. It can survive death like that. Plato and Aristotle both insisted that the reasoning part of the soul (the nous) was the “cosmic” part of the soul, and immortal. So, the part of the soul that engages in reason and logic, abstraction, conceptualization, intellectualism – all the stuff that prodding the brain or giving it an epileptic jolt cannot cause – is the part separate from physicality, hence cannot perish. Neuroscience has proved the great philosophers right!

Seduction is manipulation, manipulation is half of argument, and therefore many of us shy from it. But seduction offers more than just consensual sex. It can bring you consensus. Even Aristotle, that logical old soul, believed in the curative powers of seduction. Logic alone will rarely get people to do anything. They have to desire the act. You may not like seduction’s manipulative aspects; still, it beats fighting, which is what we usually mistake for an argument.

Foreigners like Zeno—who laid out what would be recognized for thousands of years as the three basic domains of philosophy: logic, ethics, and physics—arrived in Athens from Italy’s Elea carrying the seeds of an intellectual sport for thrill-seeking underexcitables, those whose perpetually parched limbic systems thirsted for neural thrills. Zeno’s contribution was the mental rough-and-tumble Aristotle called the dialectic. Socrates gave this gift a local twist and presented it as his own “Socratic method,” within whose social confines a variety of convention piercers found abode.

Sarebbe stato splendido, essere l'aria, Avrei potuto essere qualcosa e niente allo stesso tempo. Avrei potuto essere necessario ma anche invisibile. Tutti avrebbero avuto bisogno di me e nessuno avrebbe potuto vedermi.

-Quisiera que estuviera lloviendo - dijo - yo no necesito lluvia - dije-. te necesito ti.

Kiss me," I said. "No," he said, "you kiss me.

Experience was what Galileo considered key to formulating accurate theories, since experience, which is literally defined as exposure to and observation of facts and events, gives one a tangible, real-life occurrence that substantiates a statement, rather than raw logic, which leads one to consider what’s plausible based on probability and deduction but not necessarily what’s true. Raw logic, Galileo knew, could lead one to discover a possibility, but not an actuality. Experience exposes the facts of the REAL WORLD, not what logic and reasoning, or the mind alone can create. Aristotle did not want to rely on abstractions and intangibilities, but in reality, he did, as he used sole logic.

El amor siempre fue algo pesado para mí. Algo con lo que tenía que cargar.

Aristotle (credited as the founder of logic) stated that the whole of logic is predicated on the Law of Non-Contradiction, that a thing is what it is and cannot be something else at the same time and in the same respect. In other words a muscle is a muscle—with its own distinct identity and qualities—it is not a mind, despite one popular bodybuilding “principle” of “muscle confusion.” Given that the principle of identity applied to human muscle tissue reveals that it cannot reason or properly use the principles of thought, one must wonder then how it might become confused.

I laughed. “I have a harder rule to follow.” He laughed too. He touched my shoulder—then smiled. “Bullshit, Ari. You have the harder rule to follow? Buffalo shit. Coyote shit. All you have to do is be loyal to the most brilliant guy you’ve ever met—which is like walking barefoot through the park. I, on the other hand, have to refrain from kissing the greatest guy in the universe—which is like walking barefoot on hot coals.

The European intellectual renaissance preceded the translations from the Arabic. The latter were not the cause, but the effect of that renaissance. Like all historical events, it had economic aspects (lands newly under cultivation, new agricultural techniques) and social aspects (the rise of free cities). On the level of intellectual life, it can be understood as arising from a movement that began in the eleventh century, probably launched by the Gregorian reform of the Church.…That conflict bears witness to a reorientation of Christianity toward a transformation of the temporal world, up to that point more or less left to its own devices, with the Church taking refuge in an apocalyptical attitude that said since the world was about to end, there was little need to transform it. The Church’s effort to become an autonomous entity by drawing up a law that would be exclusive to it – Canon Law – prompted an intense need for intellectual tools. More refined concepts were called for than those available at the time. Hence the appeal to the logical works of Aristotle, who was translated from Greek to Latin, either through Arabic or directly from the Greek, and the Aristotelian heritage was recovered.

This is where the scholastic method comes in. The method consists of five parts. 1. Ask a question. 2. List the authorities that addressed the question and divide them into categories, pro and con. 3. Using a combination of logical tools from Aristotle and surprisingly sophisticated methods of linguistic analysis, analyze the authorities with the goal of resolving as many of the apparent contradictions as possible. 4. Present the solution to the problem. 5. Argue against your solution from as many angles as possible and respond to these anticipated objections. Scholasticism was tailor-made to allow large amounts of new material to be integrated into an existing body of knowledge.

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

As Erasmus wrote, “The language of truth is always simple, says Seneca: well then, nothing is simpler or truer than Christ.” However, the Aristotelians’ formal logic and “torturous obscurities” had sullied that simplicity and truth, he asserted. “What, I ask you, has Christ to do with Aristotle, or the mysteries of eternal wisdom with subtle sophistry?”19 The answer, Erasmus affirmed, was to get back to the original source of that faith, the Bible. The whole point of education should be learning the languages and skills needed for unlocking its message, especially a good grounding in Greek and Latin. Only then can the soul’s desire for the highest wisdom finally be set free.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle’s logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham’s razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

Ockham didn’t use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn’t true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn’t mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.” He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (whose works were rehabilitated when he was canonized in 1323). Finally, the student would write up his own series of quaestiones, or logical debating points, that seemed to arise from the text, and which were themselves reflections on past scholars’ debates on Aristotle.

Bernard was determined to cleanse from the Church all forms of corruption, including intellectual corruption. That meant a return to first principles, especially those of Saint Augustine, that “from this hell on earth there is no escape except through the grace of the Savior Christ, our Lord and God.”2 Bernard had heard a great deal about Abelard’s teachings. He didn’t like what he had heard. “[Abelard] casts what is holy before dogs,” was how Saint Bernard put it in a letter, “and pearls before swine.”3 Sic et Non and Abelard’s other works “run riot with a whole crop of sacrileges.” Bernard was especially offended by how Abelard had held the Church’s great authorities up to logical scrutiny, criticizing their conflicting views on the Trinity and

ARISTOTLE: All humans are mortal. POPULIST: That is a totalitarian statement. ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal? POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life. ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant. POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant. ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question. POPULIST: The real people of this country think otherwise. Our response is something that cannot be found on any elite papyrus. ARISTOTLE: (Silence) POPULIST: Prove it. Prove to me that all humans are mortal. ARISTOTLE: (Nervous smile) POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. (Confident grin, a signature trait that will be exercised constantly to annoy Aristotle.) That’s all right. What we understand from democracy is that all ideas can be represented in the public space, and they are respected equally. The gods say¦ ARISTOTLE: This is not an idea, it’s a fact. And we are talking about mortal humans. POPULIST: If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did. ARISTOTLE: This is not going anywhere. POPULIST: Please finish explaining your thinking, because I have important things to say. ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human … POPULIST: I have to interrupt you there. ARISTOTLE: Excuse me? POPULIST: Well, I have to. These days, thanks to our leader, it is perfectly clear who Socrates is. We know very well who Socrates is! You cannot deceive us any more about that evil guy. ARISTOTLE: Are you joking? POPULIST: This is no joke to us, Mr Aristotle, as it may be to you. Socrates is a fascist. My people have finally realised the truth, the real truth. The worm has turned. You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, “Therefore Socrates is mortal” right? We’re fed up with your lies. ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic. POPULIST: I respect your beliefs. ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic. POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.

Aristotle’s bias toward observation and classification also led him to break completely with the concept of Plato’s Forms. He did so not only because they seemed too abstract and logically unwieldy,13 but because they missed certain essential features of reality.

Synchronicity, Jung’s name for the phenomena of “meaningful coincidence,” tells us that something which in logical terms should not be meaningful or have any connection to my inner world nevertheless does. And the notion of correspondence tells us that something is more than itself, that it is also a symbol of some higher significance. For Aristotle, as for Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose and nothing else. For an esotericist, a rose is a rose, but it is also much else.4 And

Although the Greek philosophers thought that nature reflected an underlying order, they nevertheless believed that this order issued not from a designing mind, but from an underlying and self-evident logical principle. For this reason, many assumed that they could deduce how nature ought to behave from first principles without actually observing nature. In astronomy, for example, the Greeks (Aristotle and Ptolemy) assumed that planets must move in circular orbits. Why? Because according to the Greek cosmology, the planets moved in the “quintessential” realm of the crystalline spheres, a heavenly realm in which only perfection was possible. Since, they deduced, the most perfect form of motion was circular, the planets must move in circular orbits. What could be more logical?

Ghalib and Gerard translated no fewer than eighty-eight works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and logic, the very branches of learning which underpinned the great revival of scholarship in Europe referred to as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.16 They focused especially on translating the greatest works of the Greek scientists of antiquity, particularly Ptolemy and Aristotle, but they also worked to bring original Indian and Arab works into Latin. Among these was Khwarizmi’s Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation, and the book which went on to define algebra for Europeans, the Kitab al-Jabr.17