On Interpretation

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Aristotle's work On Interpretation (Greek Περι Ερμηνειας or Peri Hermeneias, Latin De Interpretatione) is one of the earliest extant philosophical works in the Western tradition to treat the relationship between linguistics and logic in something that approaches a comprehensive, explicit, and formal way. The contemporary philosophical discipline of hermeneutics borrows a little from this fountainhead, but more specifically turns to the question of interpreting texts, initially concentrating on the major streams of religious liturgy, but later branching out to a far broader range of cultural alluvia.

The work begins by analyzing simple categoric propositions, and draws a series of basic conclusions on the routine issues of classifying and defining basic linguistic forms, such as simple terms and propositions, nouns and verbs, negation, the quantity of simple propositions (primitive roots of the quantors in modern symbolic logic), investigations on the excluded middle (what to Aristotle isn't applicable to future tense propositions — Problem of the futures contingents), and on modal propositions.

The first five or six chapters deal with names and words of language, the succeeding six chapters with propositions and simple propositions, including the topics of negation and quantity. The last three chapters deal with modalities.

De Interpretatione is (the second) part of Organon, Aristotle's collected works on logic.

[edit] References

Aristotle, "The Categories", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 1–109 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Aristotle, "On Interpretation", Harold P. Cooke (trans.), pp. 111–179 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Aristotle, "Prior Analytics", Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Aristotle, "On the Soul" (De Anima), W. S. Hett (trans.), pp. 1–203 in Aristotle, Volume 8, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1936.