Aristotle

The Greek philosopher whose logical works, the Organon, Porphyry’s Isagoge was written to introduce.

Life

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small city in northern Greece. At about seventeen he went to Athens and stayed in Plato’s Academy until Plato’s death in 347. In 335 he founded his own school in Athens, the Lyceum, whose members were later called Peripatetics. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 he left Athens for Chalcis, where he died in 322.

His logical treatises were later grouped by the ancient commentators under the name Organon, ‘tool’, a title Aristotle himself never used: the Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations. The Categories, usually regarded as an early work, sets out ten basic kinds of being, beginning with substance.

In the Topics, Aristotle sometimes treats four kinds of predicate (genus, property, definition and accident) as covering all predication. Later commentators turned these into the five predicables (genus, species, differentia, property and accident), and Porphyry’s Isagoge explains them as a preparation for reading the Categories. Al-Fārābī was called ‘the second master’ because Aristotle was regarded as the first.

Works

• Categories (Kitāb al-Maqūlāt) كِتَابُ المَقُولَاتِThe first book of the Organon; Porphyry’s Isagoge was written as an introduction to it.work
• Topics (Kitāb al-Jadal) كِتَابُ الجَدَلِContains Aristotle’s fourfold division of predicates, the starting point for the five predicables. Translated into Arabic by, among others, Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī (TDV).work

Reception

In the Alexandrian schools and in the Syriac and Arabic traditions, Porphyry’s Isagoge was read before Aristotle’s Categories, and the Arabic Organon began with it.

From Ibn Sīnā onward, later Arabic logicians worked mostly from Ibn Sīnā rather than directly from Aristotle’s texts (Street, SEP).