Neoplatonic logic and Aristotelian logic-I

Abstract

IT is well known that Ennead VI contains an onslaught by Plotinus on Aristotle's Categories, but that his pupil, Porphyry, established both the Categories and Predicables as part of the Neoplatonic and eventually the Scholastic philosophical curriculum. So far as this situation has been studied, it has been for the most part from the standpoint of its extemal history. Philology has traced many of Plotinus's criticisms to the commentaries of the Middle Academy, and many of Porphyry's expressions to Stoic logicians; historical enquiry has found motives in the social position of the Schools for the Neoplatonic acceptance of Aristotle's logic. This valuable work, however, tends at best to ignore the philosophical understanding of both the criticism and the reinstatement of Aristotle, and at worst to give an erroneous account of the place of Neoplatonism in the history of logic. First, the criticism is of intrinsic philosophical interest, because it aims to shew that 'inseparable' universals, and the whole theory of genus and species, are unable to do the task required of Secondly, the logic which Porphyry and his successors reinstate resembles that of the Stoics in being stripped of certain metaphysical implications. The reason for this is not corruption of Platonism by the Stoa, but the inevitable effect of wanting Aristotle the elementary logician without Aristotle the metaphysician. And the result is that a good deal of credit has gone to the Stoics which was due to the Neoplatonists. Useful as it is, Prantl's work needs rewriting. This must not be misunderstood. In dealing with Neoplatonists we cannot be concerned, as we can in the case of Stoics, withformal logic. I doubt whether there is a single theorem whose discovery can be attributed to them. We are concerned with logic in a wide sense, which can for the present purposes be quite accurately defined as the sense in which the Categories and Predicables are logical doctrines. What Porphyry achieved what he was driven to achieve was a logic of this kind, which, merely because of its restricted metaphysical implications, was valuable to Boetius and the Schoolmen and important in the history of philosophy. It allowed Aristotelian logic to become an autonomous

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