General Studies A2 Revision

Admin | January 06, 2012 | Comments Off

General Studies A2 Revision

General Studies A2 Revision

The Greeks

Aristotle divided up the areas of philosophical knowledge into theoretical (mathematics, philosophy of nature, metaphysics), practical (ethics, political philosophy), and productive (Art, Rhetoric), but logic does not seem to have any place of its own in this division. There is only one passage in the Rhetoric 1359 b10 where Aristotle speaks of logic as the ‘analytic science’. In general, however, logic for him was part of a general ‘organon’ (instrument) that should be learned first (Metaphysics, 995a12) in order for the scholar to become competent for the study of any of the real sciences. The reason that logic should be learned first was that it teaches the method that is to be observed if one is to acquire a science, and one cannot simultaneously learn a method and use it. Indeed, unless we first know what the logical demands of a science are, we may not possess the common methodology or procedure that must be followed if the science is to be acquired.

In later divisions of the sciences, by contrast, logic most frequently is included among the philosophical sciences rather than regarded as a preparatory tool. Thus after Aristotle, the Stoics would divide the sciences into physics, ethics, and logic or dialectic.

Kant

It is this Hellenistic division that was later taken up and revised by Immanuel Kant in his famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, though Kant otherwise regarded logic as “finished and complete” since the time of Aristotle (see Critique of Pure Reason, B viii). According to Kant’s revised division of the philosophical disciplines in the Groundwork, logic simply is ‘formal’ philosophy in the sense that it deals only with the form of understanding, as opposed to material philosophy (physics/doctrine of nature and ethics/doctrine of morals), which is concerned with determinate objects and with the laws governing them. However, Kant did not appear to regard the systematic study of logic as necessary for the study of other parts of philosophy, as becomes clear from the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant starts out dealing with a transcendental exposition of space and time as conditions of the possibility of experience, and only then moves on to the transcendental deduction of the categories and to a discussion of formal logic.