“What did Aristotle contribute to the discipline of Logic?”
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher that lived from 384 BC to 322 BC. Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece and he was the son of Nichomachus. In 367 he was sent to Athens to study philosophy with a great Greek philosopher named Plato. Some years later he traveled to Macedonia to tutor Alexander the Great. Aristotle returned to Athens and set up a school of his own following his success with Alexander, it was known as the Lyceum.
Aristotle is one of the most important figures in Western philosophy. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.
Aristotle is recognized as the creator of logic. Logic is defined as “the study of the process by which a statement follows by necessity from one or more other statements.” In other words, logic is the instrument by means of which we come to know anything. He developed rules for reasoning that were widely accepted by Western philosophers until the nineteenth century. Aristotle uses the term “logic” to refer to the study of verbal reasoning. Aristotle’s writings on the subject of logic were grouped together and named Organon. The philosophers of his time considered logic and reasoning as the main instrument of scientific exploration.
His most profound achievement is the theory of the categorical syllogism. He proposed methods on how to categorize categorical syllogism in terms of mood and figure, and he developed rules for identifying the validity of these syllogisms. He also developed the concepts of possibility and necessity and how they apply to categorical propositions. He showed how arguments could be defective in terms of thirteen forms of informal fallacy. Aristotle's logic, especially these theories motioned, have had unmatched influence on the history of Western reasoning.