Term logic

In philosophy, term logic, also known as traditional logic, syllogistic logic or Aristotelian logic, is a loose name for an approach to logic that began with Aristotle and that was dominant until the advent of modern predicate logic in the late nineteenth century. This entry is an introduction to the term logic needed to understand philosophy texts written before predicate logic came to be seen as the only formal logic of interest. Readers lacking a grasp of the basic terminology and ideas of term logic can have difficulty understanding such texts, because their authors typically assumed an acquaintance with term logic.

Aristotle's logical work is collected in the six texts that are collectively known as the Organon. Two of these texts in particular, namely the Prior Analytics and De Interpretatione, contain the heart of Aristotle's treatment of judgements and formal inference, and it is principally this part of Aristotle's works that is about term logic. Modern work on Aristotle's logic builds on the tradition started in 1951 with the establishment by Jan Lukasiewicz of a revolutionary paradigm. The Jan Lukasiewicz approach was reinvigorated in the early 1970s by John Corcoran and Timothy Smiley - which informs modern translations of Prior Analytics by Robin Smith in 1989 and Gisela Striker in 2009.

The fundamental assumption behind the theory is that propositions are composed of two terms - hence the name "two-term theory" or "term logic" - and that the reasoning process is in turn built from propositions:

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