Colloquium 7 What Use Is Aristotle's Organon? Robin Smith

My title is ambiguous. I might be construed as asking what use we, today, as philosophers, can make of the collection of treatises which has been known since the time of the Aristotelian commentators as the "organon." These treatises are, in the main, a collection of works on logic and closely related subjects, including fallacious arguments and demonstrative sci- ence. Tradition regarded them as giving Aristotle's account of scientific philosophical method: the "instrument" necessary for the attainment of knowledge. It was as such that Francis Bacon rejected Aristotle's Organon and offered his own as its replace- ment. Scientific method, he thought, should be a way to attain new knowledge; but he saw in the Aristotelian procedures he had learned at school nothing but rules for argumentation and deduction, which could never lead to the enlargement of what one already knew. For the purposes he took to be important, then, he found the Aristotelian instrument useless. More recent philosophical interpretation of Aristotle has been perhaps more sympathetic to its philosophical superstructure. If we regard the picture of demonstrative science of the Posterior Analytics as an account of scientific explanation rather than an account of scien- tific discovery, its plausibility is much greater. However, the logical theories on which Aristotle relies, especially its theory of inference, are now more or less universally recognized to be inadequate to any formalization even of the sciences Aristotle himself knew: Greek mathematical demonstrations steadfastly resist any translation into categorical syllogisms. Even the use of modern formal methods to interpret Aristotle's works seems at best to permit us to congratulate him for having come close, in his awkward way, to something we have a much better grasp of now. But congratulation tends to be patronizing, since we only congratulate Aristotle for having been almost as clever as we. You might, then, take me to be asking me to be asking: what philosophical value is there in these works today? Or again, I might be asking an historical question about the interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy. The grouping together of the six treatises Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophisticat Refutations under the title "Instrument" appears to have been an innovation of Andronicus of Rhodes, the leader of the Peripatetic school who, around the middle of the first century B.C., was responsible for something of a renaissance of Aristotelian philosophy and inau- gurated the commentary tradition which flourished for the remainder of antiquity and beyond. For Andronicus and his successors, these works were the first works one should study in the course of a philosophical education because they provided the tools necessary for understanding any kind of philosophical or scientific discourse. But by calling them "instrumental" works (Of1YCXVl1CÓ¡), the commentators had a very specific point in mind. They regarded their contents as not really part of philoso- phy but only an instrument of philosophy, though an instru- ment which it was the business of philosophy itself to provide, just as the blacksmith's art provides itself with hammer and anvil. The commentators tell us that the other philosophical schools disagreed: the Stoics counted Logic as one of the three divisions of philosophy (the other two being Physics and Ethics), and the Academics thought of logic as both part and instrument of philosophy. But all this controversy is, from our present-day perspective, quite alien to the study of Aristotle, since Aristotle himself never speaks of an Organon or otherwise groups just these six treatises together as the official introduc- tion to philosophy. It seems, instead, that the Organon as a coherent and unified group of documents is an invention of the commentators, forged to serve their particular needs in develop-