Topics (Aristotle)

The Topics (Greek: Τοπικά; Latin: Topica) is the name given to one of Aristotle's six works on logic collectively known as the Organon:

The Topics constitutes Aristotle's treatise on the art of dialectic—the invention and discovery of arguments in which the propositions rest upon commonly held opinions or endoxa (ἔνδοξα in Greek).Topoi (τόποι) are "places" from which such arguments can be discovered or invented.

In his treatise on the Topics, Aristotle does not explicitly define a topos, though it is "at least primarily a strategy for argument not infrequently justified or explained by a principle." He characterises it in the Rhetoric thus: "I call the same thing element and topos; for an element or a topos is a heading under which many enthymemes fall." By element, he means a general form under which enthymemes of the same type can be included. Thus, the topos is a general argument source, from which the individual arguments are instances, and is a sort of template from which many individual arguments can be constructed. The word τόπος (tópos, literally "place, location") is also related to the ancient memory method of "loci", by which things to be remembered are recollected by mentally connecting them with successive real or imagined places.

Though the Topics, as a whole, does not deal directly with the "forms of syllogism", clearly Aristotle contemplates the use of topics as places from which dialectical syllogisms (i.e. arguments from the commonly held ἔνδοξα, éndoxa) may be derived. This is evidenced by the fact that the introduction to the Topics contains and relies upon his definition of reasoning (συλλογισμός, syllogismós): a verbal expression (λόγος, lógos) in which, certain things having been laid down, other things necessarily follow from these.. Dialectical reasoning is thereafter divided by Aristotle into inductive and deductive parts. The endoxa themselves are sometimes, but not always, set out in a propositional form, i.e. an express major or minor proposition, from which the complete syllogism may be constructed. Often, such propositional construction is left as a task to the practitioner of the dialectic art; in these instances Aristotle gives only the general strategy for argument, leaving the "provision of propositions" to the ingenuity of the disputant.

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