From Aristotle to Cicero.

Essays in
Ancient Philosophy Gisela Striker
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From Aristotle to Cicero
From Aristotle to Cicero
Essays on Ancient Philosophy

GISELA STRIKER

1
 3
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 Acknowledgements

Chapters 1–6, 8–10 and 12–15 were previously published as follows:

Chapter 1 (orig. in German as ‘Aristoteles über Syllogismen aufgrund einer
Hypothese’) in Hermes 107, 1979, 33–50.
Chapter 2 (orig. in German as ‘Notwendigkeit mit Lücken’) in neue hefte für
philosophie 24/25, 1985, 146–64.
Chapter 3 in Ancient Philosophy 14, 1994, 39–51.
Chapter 4 in M. Frede/G. Striker (ed.), Rationality in Greek Thought, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996, 203–20.
Chapter 5 in J. Gentzler (ed.), Method in Ancient Philosophy, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998, 209–26.
Chapter 6 in D. Gicheva-Gocheva (ed.), The Challenge Aristotle, University
Printing House St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia (Bulgaria), 2018, 99–110.
Chapter 8 in B. Morison/K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Episteme, etc., Oxford
University Press, 2011, 141–50.
Chapter 9 in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, California
University Press, 1996, 286–302.
Chapter 10 in B. Reis/S. Haffmans (ed.), The Virtuous Life in Greek Ethics,
Cambridge University Press, 2006, 127–41.
Chapter 12 in B. Inwood/J. Mansfeld (ed.), Assent and Argument, Leiden: Brill,
1997, 257–76.
Chapter 13 in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 83, 2001, 113–29.
Chapter 14 in Ph. Mitsis (ed.) The Oxford Handbook on Epicurus and
Epicureanism, Oxford University Press, 2020, 41–58.
Chapter 15 in Fiona Leigh (ed.), Themes in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic
Philosophy, University of London Press, 2021, 121–30.
I am grateful to the publishers for the permission to reprint and translate.
Chapters 7, 11, and 16 have not been published before.
 Introduction

This collection brings together different lines of research that I have been pursuing
throughout my academic career: Aristotle’s logic and ethics, and Hellenistic
epistemology and ethics.
At the University of Göttingen, where I got most of my philosophical educa-
tion, a doctoral degree in philosophy required the addition of two secondary fields,
for which I chose the two classical languages, Greek and Latin, which I had already
learned in high school. After receiving my doctoral degree with a dissertation on
Plato’s Philebus, I continued to work on ancient philosophy, but turned to the
Hellenistic period, a field less studied by scholars than the great classics, although
it had an enormous influence on later European philosophy. Now, since teaching
is not limited to one’s specialty, during the first fifteen years, while still in
Göttingen, I was also teaching courses in contemporary philosophy—epistemology,
ethics, philosophy of mind—that kept me in touch with recent developments. Since
I moved to the United States, I have been mostly responsible for teaching ancient
philosophy, but I have continued to follow contemporary philosophy in the fields
I was studying in the ancient authors. This seemed to me the best way to engage with
historical texts, not limiting oneself to exegesis, but engaging in discussion with
authors who often had a different perspective, not treating them merely as prede-
cessors, but also to learn from them. So, for example, Greek ethics saw morality in
the wider framework of a good human life, and the ancient Sceptics were not
fascinated by questions about the existence of an external world, questions that
seem to have been prevalent ever since the time of Descartes.
A few years into my time in Göttingen, I was invited to produce a new German
translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Analytics. Since I had long been
interested in Aristotle’s logic, I accepted—vastly underestimating the difficulties
of the task and the time it would take me to complete it. In the meantime,
Hellenistic philosophy was having a kind of renaissance among philosophers
interested in the history of their subject, who had until then more or less limited
themselves to the study of the Presocratics and the two great classical philo-
sophers, Plato and Aristotle. This led to a lively exchange of ideas between
scholars, both philosophers and classicists, now working in this field. So
I continued my research in both areas, slowly making my way through
Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, first in German, then in English, while also publishing
papers on Hellenistic epistemology and ethics.

From Aristotle to Cicero: Essays on Ancient Philosophy. Gisela Striker, Oxford University Press. © Gisela Striker 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868385.001.0001
x 

The present collection includes a number of essays on Aristotle’s logic that deal
with questions in more detail than would have been appropriate for a commen-
tary, including an, as yet unpublished, paper on the title ‘Analytica’ (chapter 7),
and a short piece outlining the development of Aristotle’s theory of argument that
might serve as a background to the paper on analysis (chapter 6). It was presented
at a conference to celebrate Aristotle’s 2400th birthday in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first
two chapters were originally published in German. I am very grateful for the
meticulous translations of Joshua Mendelsohn.
The four articles on Aristotle that follow those chapters are mainly the result of
teaching these subjects for many years. The second part of the collection contains
later studies in Hellenistic epistemology and ethics. After a lot of discussion and
new contributions by other historians of philosophy who had begun to investigate
Hellenistic philosophy in the preceding decades, I have been going beyond the
earlier generation of Stoics and Epicureans and Sceptics, and also sometimes
trying to correct my earlier views. The series ends with a, yet to be published,
study of a work by Panaetius, a Stoic of the second century , whose book on
appropriate action Cicero used as a model for his last philosophical work, the De
Officiis. At a time when Cicero was still being read as a philosopher in his own
right, that book, dedicated to his son, became a vademecum for young gentlemen
from the Renaissance until at least the end of the eighteenth century. It was clearly
read as a general book of morality and manners, not as a work of Stoic philosophy,
and I was interested in the changes, if any, in Stoicism that made this book
enormously influential, quite apart from the influence of Stoic philosophy in
other fields.
Special thanks are due to Peter Momtchiloff for giving me the opportunity to
bring these papers together.

Hamburg, March 2021

 1
Aristotle on Syllogisms ‘from a Hypothesis’
For Professor Jürgen Mau on the occasion of his 60th birthday,
26 September 1976

In chapters 23 and 44 of Prior Analytics I, Aristotle discusses arguments ‘from a

hypothesis’ and claims that these include the reductio-arguments. His descriptions in
both chapters show that what direct and indirect arguments of this group have in
common is that the ‘hypothesis’ is not a part of the argument, but either an agreement
to the effect that a certain proposition will be accepted as proven if another
proposition has been proven, or—in cases of reductio ad impossibile—a logical
principle for which no explicit agreement is needed.

In chapters A 23 and A 44 of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle deals with a type of

arguments that he calls syllogisms ἐξ ὑποθέσεως.¹ On neither occasion is his aim to

¹ Without wishing to enter the fray of the long-contested question as to what an Aristotelian
syllogism actually is, I should like to clarify, so that I am not misunderstood, that by an Aristotelian
syllogism I mean a valid argument or a deduction. T. Smiley (‘What is a Syllogism?’, J. Phil. Logic 2,
1973, 138) draws attention to the fact that one cannot identify syllogisms with arguments because the
same syllogism may be used in various arguments. It seems to me doubtful, however, that Aristotle
would have noticed this distinction—the definition of the syllogism in A 1.24b18–20, in any case, seems
only to refer to deductions that occur as complete arguments. On this, see M. Frede, ‘Stoic vs.
Aristotelian Syllogistic’, Archiv. f. Gesch. Phil. 56, 1974, 16ff.
In the two chapters I am considering here, Aristotle uses the word συλλογισμός in a broad sense that
seems to include all valid arguments, as well as in a narrower sense in which it only refers to an
argument in one of the syllogistic moods. The context makes clear which sense he intends in each case,
so I have not indicated this. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to syllogisms ἐξ ὑποθέσεως as
‘hypothetical arguments’ in what follows. This should not be taken to imply that they refer to what
were later called hypothetical syllogisms.
The moods of the Aristotelian syllogistic will be referred to in what follows using their traditional
Latin names (Barbara, Celarent, etc.). These names provide information about the form of the premises
as well as the conclusion of the syllogism in question. They each have three syllables whose vowels
indicate the quantity and quality of a statement: a stands for a universal affirmative statement of the
kind ‘A belongs to all B’ or ‘all B are A’, e for a universal negative (‘A belongs to no B’), i for particular
affirmative (‘A belongs to some B’) and o for particular negative (‘A does not belong to some B’).
Aristotle divides syllogistic moods into three figures (σχήματα) that differ in their placement of the
middle term: In the first figure the middle term appears once as subject and once as predicate; in the
second figure both times as predicate, in the third figure both times as subject. If one knows the figure of
a mood, one can construct the corresponding syllogism using its name. The premises of the mood
Barbara in the first figure, for instance, have the form ‘A belongs to all B’ and ‘B belongs to all C’, and

From Aristotle to Cicero: Essays on Ancient Philosophy. Gisela Striker, Oxford University Press. © Gisela Striker 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868385.003.0001
2    

characterize these arguments or to demonstrate their validity. In A 23, hypothet-

ical syllogisms are treated in the context of completeness considerations.
Following on from A 7, Aristotle attempts to show that every proof and every
valid argument can be reduced to the universal moods of the first figure (Barbara
and Celarent). In A 44 his object is to argue, seemingly in opposition to what he
tries to prove in A 23, that hypothetical arguments cannot be put into syllogistic
form. The apparent contradiction between the theses of the two chapters will not
interest us further here—it is probably best solved by restricting the thesis of A 23
to the effect that every valid argument must contain at least one syllogism, which
can then be reduced to Barbara or Celarent. Aristotle himself seems to have
intended this restriction, since even in A 23 he describes hypothetical arguments
as consisting of two parts, where only one of the parts is a syllogism.
The question that will occupy us here is rather the following: What did Aristotle
actually mean by a syllogism ἐξ ὑποθέσεως? The expression, which also shows
up in the Topics (A 18,108b12), is explained neither here nor in any other
place. This allows us to infer that it was presumed to be familiar, at least in the
Academy. As Shorey has emphasized, Aristotle is probably referring to the
procedure that is introduced by Plato in the Meno as investigation ἐξ ὑποθέσεως
(Meno 86Eff.).² So Aristotle is here speaking of a kind of argument with which the
reader or listener is already familiar, and which therefore need not be character-
ized more closely.
Aristotle also counts reductio ad impossibile as a hypothetical argument (40b25).
It is not entirely certain whether this classification was also already in place, since,
first, Aristotle does mention it himself and, second, it seems to serve to completely
classify all valid arguments under two headings.
Aristotle begins his discussion of completeness with the claim (40b23) that every
proof and every syllogism must demonstrate that something belongs or does not
belong, either universally or particularly; and—the significant part for our
purposes—either in the ostensive way (δεικτικῶς) or from a hypothesis (ἐξ
ὑποθέσεως). The ostensive method of proof had been contrasted with proof διὰ
τοῦ ἀδυνάτου in A 7 already (29a32, cf. also A 29,45b8, b14; B 14.62b29, b38); and
since reductio ad impossible is one type of hypothetical argument, one might at first
assume that it is the contrast between direct and indirect arguments that Aristotle
intends. Aristotle does, in fact, use the expressions δεικτικὴ and δεικτικῶς in the
sense of ‘direct’ or ‘directly’ in chapter B 14 (62b29ff.); he describes the difference

the conclusion ‘A belongs to all C’. For further details, see G. Patzig, Die aristotelische Syllogistik, 3rd
ed., Göttingen 1969, 11–13; W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford 1962, 67ff. See 232f.
for a more precise explanation of the names.
² Cf. P. Shorey, ‘ΣΥΛΛΟΓΙΣΜΟΙ ΕΞ ΥΠΟΘΕΣΕΩΣ in Aristotle’, Amer. Journ. Philol. X, 1889,
460–2. On the Meno see R. Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, 2nd ed., Oxford 1953, 114ff.
    ‘    ’ 3

between ostensive proof and reductio ad impossibile as follows: ‘A demonstration

that leads to an impossibility differs from an ostensive demonstration in that it puts
as a premise what it wants to reject, leading away into an agreed falsehood, while an
ostensive demonstration begins from agreed propositions.’ One could then explain
why direct proof is characterized in this passage as ostensive, that is, as ‘showing
something’, by saying that a direct proof presents states of affairs that make it
necessary that the thing to be proven is the case, whereas indirect arguments only
show why the opposite cannot be the case. However, first, ostensive proof is only
contrasted with reductio ad impossibile here, not with hypothetical proof in general,
and second, the hypothetical arguments that are treated in A 23 and 44 are not all
indirect; this actually holds only for reductio arguments.
The word ‘hypothesis’ might perhaps suggest the contrast between scientific
proof from necessary premises and arguments from ‘merely’ hypothetical prem-
ises, which need not actually be true. However, this cannot be what Aristotle
means here, for in this case, the distinction between ostensive and hypothetical
arguments would have to coincide with the distinction between proofs in the strict
sense (that is, syllogisms with necessary premises) and dialectical syllogisms,
which Aristotle mentions briefly in A 1 (24a30–b15). But as we will see in what
follows, Aristotle counts all arguments that are syllogistic in form as ostensive
arguments, and we must therefore assume that Aristotle means to specify a formal
property of certain arguments when he describes them as ἐξ ὑποθέσεως.
In view of the ensuing completeness argument, it is certainly correct, as
Bochenski³ and others have noted, that Aristotle classifies all non-syllogistic
arguments as συλλογισμοὶ ἐξ ὑποθέσεως. This label is, however, clearly not a
purely negative characterization, and so there remains the further question of
what formal commonality of non-syllogistic arguments Aristotle had in mind
when he used this expression.
This question is complicated by the fact that Aristotle distinguishes in both
chapters between hypothetical arguments through the impossible and other
hypothetical arguments.⁴ An adequate interpretation needs, therefore, not only
to show what formal difference there is between ostensive and hypothetical
arguments; it also needs to show what the various types of hypothetical arguments
that Aristotle distinguishes have in common and how they differ. In the best case,
such an interpretation would put us in a position to determine what domain of
arguments Aristotle’s completeness claim refers to and to what extent it is possible
to accept it in light of this.

³ I.M. Bochenski, La Logique de Théophraste, Fribourg (Suisse) 1947, 105. Cf. also F. Solmsen, Die
Entwicklung der aristotelischen Logik und Rhetorik, Berlin 1929, 64ff.
⁴ The fact that Aristotle has no special term for the ‘other’ cases seems to me to indicate that
originally only these arguments were called (συλλογισμοὶ) ἐξ ὑποθέσεως. The Platonic argument in the
Meno must have belonged to this class, and outside of the An.Pr. it is in any case only arguments of this
sort that are called hypothetical.
4    

II

Studying the word ὑπόθεσις seems in this case not to be of any further help.
Aristotle normally uses the term ‘hypothesis’ to refer to various kinds of under-
lying assumptions of arguments.⁵ The fact that an argument contains a hypothesis
is certainly not sufficient to render it a hypothetical argument, since hypotheses
can also occur in syllogisms. Our topic here is not merely arguments ‘with’ a
hypothesis, but rather arguments ‘on the basis of ’ or ‘from’ (ἐξ) a hypothesis—
that is, the expression refers not only to the fact that a hypothesis is used, but
rather to the role of the hypothesis in the argument. Whereas it is reasonably clear
what the hypothesis is for the ‘remaining’ hypothetical arguments (which Aristotle
discusses second in A 23 and first in A 44), the inclusion of reductio ad impossibile
arguments means that we still need to ask the question: What actually is the
hypothesis on account of which all of these arguments are to count as hypothetical?
To begin with the simpler case, direct hypothetical arguments: If one follows
the example of A 44 (50a19–26), a typical argument of this form appears to be as
follows. It begins with a hypothesis or agreement (ὁμολογία) that takes the form of
an if–then sentence, for example: ‘If there is not a single power of contraries, then
there is also not a single knowledge.’ There follows a syllogistic proof for the
antecedent of the conditional—or in any case Aristotle says so. The proof that he
alludes to in the text is, however, as Alexander rightly notes (in An.Pr. 387, 5–11)
not a syllogism. Aristotle writes: ‘ . . . that not every power is a power of contraries:
not, for example, of the healthy and the sick, for then the same thing would be
healthy and sick at the same time.’ The proof sketched here seems to consist of a
modus tollens argument and a syllogism (cf. Ross’s commentary ad loc.). Aristotle,
however, evidently assumes that it can be put in syllogistic form. From the
analogous example in B 26 (69b13ff.) one can infer, as the commentators explain,
that he had in mind a syllogism in Felapton: ‘The healthy and the sick are not
based on a single capacity; the sick and the healthy are opposites; therefore, not all
opposites are based on a single capacity.’ This, however, does not fully capture the
argument given in the text, and thus Alexander (387.1–5) and Philoponus (in An.
Pr. 358,27–31) add another syllogism as a proof of the first premise.⁶
After establishing the antecedent of the conditional, one can proceed to the
consequent, the demonstrandum, ‘on the basis of the hypothesis’. The transition is,
as Aristotle emphasizes (50a24–26), necessary, but not syllogistic.

⁵ Cf. H. Bonitz, Index Aristotelicus, Berlin 1870, repr. Graz 1955, s. v. ὑπόθεσις, 796b59: ‘logice
ὑποθέσεις eae sunt propositiones, sive demonstratae sive non demonstratae, quibus positis aliquid
demonstratur.’
⁶ The example makes clear that Aristotle’s remark about this type of hypothetical argument
represents only a rough generalization. He had evidently not verified whether the analysis he points
to—that such arguments consist of a syllogism and a hypothetical step—was really applicable in all
cases. It is thus hardly surprising that he does not consider the possibility of proving the antecedent of
the hypothesis other than by a syllogism. On this, see also pp. xxf. below.
    ‘    ’ 5

What Aristotle describes here seems to be, to put it anachronistically, an

argument in modus ponendo ponens supplemented with a syllogism for the second
premise. Aristotle initially leaves it open whether this is the only possible form this
type of argument can have. It certainly seems that the hypothesis describes the
conditional premise, and it is thus natural to follow the usage of later logicians in
viewing the use of a conditional premise as the reason for characterizing an
argument as ἐξ ὑποθέσεως.⁷ This, however, does not fully explain Aristotle’s
text, as one can see from the case of the reductio.
As described in B 11 (61a27–31), an Aristotelian syllogism per impossibile
proceeds as follows: One begins with a premise that is accepted as true and the
assumption of the contradictory of the demonstrandum. From these two things a
syllogistic conclusion is derived that is evidently false. Since the first premise was
assumed to be true, the negation of the demonstrandum is shown to be false by the
‘impossible’ conclusion. Its contradictory is thus true by the law of excluded
middle (B 11,62a13–15).⁸
The apagogical proofs of chapter A 5 and 6 (27a36–b1; 28b17–20) seem at first
to present a different procedure. Here Aristotle begins with the premises of the
mood to be established and then uses one of the premises together with the
negation of the conclusion to derive the negation of the other premise. In this
way he shows that the negation of the conclusion is incompatible with the
premises and thus that the conclusion follows from the premises. The impossi-
bility of the proposition derived arises in this case from the fact that its contra-
dictory is taken as a premise. These proofs thus proceed according to the law of
propositional logic:

ðp&qÞ & ½ðq&sÞ > p > s

In the syllogisms per impossibile that are treated in B 11–14, by contrast, the
negation of the syllogistically derived conclusion does not seem to be one of the
premises (61a24).⁹ That the derived proposition is ‘impossible’ seems to arise
simply from the fact that its contradictory is evidently true (61a25; b14). Aristotle,
however, adds in B 14 (62b33–37) that the proof through reductio ad impossibile
proceeds from two propositions that are granted, namely from one of the premises
of the syllogism and the negation of the derived conclusion. Accordingly, the
difference seems to be a matter of where the respective premises are introduced. In

⁷ As does M. Kneale in The Development of Logic, Oxford 1962, 98 (or so it seems): ‘Here the
subject-matter seems to demand an explicit discussion of the varieties of argument with one condi-
tional premise.’
⁸ Strictly speaking, of course, all that can be inferred from the ‘impossible’ conclusion is that one of
the two premises must be false. From this, and the presupposition that one of the two premises is true, it
then follows that the other is false. Aristotle makes clear at the outset which premise is to be given up by
characterizing it as the ‘hypothesis’.
⁹ Smiley, op. cit., 153, n. 2.
6    

A 5 and 6 Aristotle carries out a deduction in order to show that a certain type of
conclusion follows from certain premises, which therefore must naturally be
supplied at the outset. In B 11, however, Aristotle is talking about how a particular
type of conclusion can be proven. Now, a proof by reductio will be expedient to use
only if the falsity of the derived statement is evident (cf. Top. Θ 2.157b34–158a2;
An.Po. A 26,87a14–17) and its negation thus need not itself be assumed in advance.
That, of course, does not mean that it is not one of the presuppositions from which
the proposition to be proven follows.
The proof of the incommensurability of the diagonal, mentioned as an example
in A 24 and 44, points to a different type of reductio, of which Aristotle nowhere
offers a detailed analysis (and which could hardly be put into syllogistic form).
Here the procedure by all appearances seems to consist in deriving an explicit
contradiction from an assumption, together with premises that have been proven
or are known to be true. Accordingly, this form of reductio is based on the law of
propositional logic [p > (q&–q)] > –p.
That Aristotle uses this example, even though his own apagogical proofs
normally proceed otherwise, seems to me to be evidence that he had not distin-
guished these two kinds of reductio proof. The incommensurability proof simply
provides an especially clear example of a conclusion that is evidently impossible.¹⁰
I will thus assume in what follows that when Aristotle speaks of arguments
through the impossible generally, he is referring to the standard case he initially
describes.
No conditional premise seems to appear in an argument of this sort. One could,
of course, formulate the syllogistic part of the argument as an if–then premise, as
the formula of propositional logic presented above suggests. However, if the
expression ἐξ ὑποθέσεως referred to the use of a conditional premise, then
Aristotle himself would be characterizing the syllogism as a hypothesis, and this
is plainly not what he does. That rules out the possibility of explaining Aristotle’s
terminology by speaking of hypothetical syllogisms in the way that later became
common.
In view of the type of arguments just described, three different interpretations
have been proposed. These all have something going for them, but they also all
face problems.

¹⁰ A further type, which Corcoran (‘Aristotle’s Natural Deduction System’, in J. Corcoran (ed.),
Ancient Logic and its Modern Interpretations, Dordrecht 1974, 115) claims to find in A 29,45b1–3 and
refers to as ‘abnormal reductio’, seems to me to be the result of a misunderstanding. Aristotle does not
claim that one can transform a direct proof into an indirect one by taking the opposite of the conclusion
as a hypothesis at the outset, deriving the conclusion and finally recognizing that one has assumed the
opposite of the conclusion. He says only that if one already has an ostensive syllogism, then in every
case, one can start from the contradictory opposite of the conclusion together with one of the premises
and derive a false statement (namely the negation of the other premise) and so prove the conclusion per
impossibile. It is evidently presupposed here that the truth of the ostensive premises is known, due to
the use of the tables of premises.
    ‘    ’ 7

(A) On the oldest interpretation, due to Alexander of Aphrodisias,¹¹ the

hypothesis on account of which reductio ad impossibile is classified as a hypo-
thetical argument is the contradictory of the demonstrandum. The fact that
Aristotle undeniably characterizes this proposition in many places expressly as a
ὑπόθεσις (41a32, cf. especially B 11–14, B 17 passim) initially favours this inter-
pretation. This use of language evidently corresponds to the fact that a proposition
is assumed without one thereby wishing to commit oneself to its truth. To this
extent, this interpretation seems to provide the most natural explanation. The
characterization of reductio as a hypothetical syllogism can then be understood as
follows: The proof of the demonstrandum relies on a hypothesis insofar as its
‘recognized falsity’ is derived, and on this basis one can then infer the contradict-
ory of the hypothesis. Difficulties, however, arise for this interpretation when one
attempts to describe the formal characteristic that allows such arguments to be
treated together with the remaining hypothetical arguments. In the case of
reductio, the hypothesis is, on this interpretation, a categorical premise that is
assumed merely argumenti causa. In the remaining cases, however, it is one of the
accepted premises of the argument, a premise that also has a different form. It is
not easy to see why Aristotle would have wished to bring these two types of
argument together under a single heading. The most conspicuous commonality,
to which the characterization as hypothetical should at least be related in some
way, is, of course, the occurrence of a non-syllogistic argumentative step. This is
also what Aristotle seems to emphasize when, in both chapters, he describes
hypothetical arguments as consisting in two steps (41a23–41b1 passim;
50a23–28, 30–32): They consist, 1. of a syllogism, and 2. of a step ἐξ ὑποθέσεως,
which is indeed necessitated, but not syllogistic. According to the interpretation
discussed here, however, the hypothesis in the reductio is precisely a part of the
syllogism. One should, therefore, perhaps look for a different explanation, one on
which the hypothesis is that which permits the transition to the demonstrandum.
The difficulty that arises from the fact that Aristotle would be speaking of two
different hypotheses within the reductio is perhaps not so severe when one
considers that the classification of reductio arguments as hypothetical was perhaps
introduced only in view of the complete classification of all valid arguments.
Aristotle might thus have first used the term ‘hypothesis’ only for premises
assumed argumenti causa in a reductio and then later have had the idea of
bringing reductio arguments together with those which he had earlier called
hypothetical arguments, which would then have led to the somewhat unfortunate
double use of ‘hypothesis’. This brings us to the two other interpretations.

¹¹ In An.Pr. 256,18–25; cf. also N.M. Thiel, ‘Die Bedeutung des Wortes Hypothesis bei Aristoteles’,
(Diss.), Freiburg 1919, 26ff.; H. Gomperz, Die deutsche Literatur über die . . . aristotelische Philosophie
1899 und 1900, Archiv. f. Gesch. Phil 16, 1903, 274f.; K. Ebbinghaus, Ein formales Modell der Syllogistik
des Aristoteles, Hypomnemata 9, Göttingen 1964, 41ff.
8    

(B) According to Sigwart, Shorey, and, more recently, Mignucci,¹² the hypothesis
is the negation of the ‘impossible’ conclusion. The assumption that this con-
clusion is false enables us to infer the opposite of the first hypothesis. This
assumption is not explicitly characterized as (the) hypothesis by Aristotle, but
he does say in B 14 (62b35–37) that one must assume the falsity of the
conclusion. In addition to this, one might also appeal to the remark in A 44
(50a35–38), according to which one needs no prior agreement for reductio,
‘because the falsehood’ (scil. of the derived conclusion) ‘is evident’. With
hypothetical arguments of the first type, one requires agreement as (or to) the
hypothesis, but not with a reductio—thus the ‘evident falsehood’ must be that
which is here characterized as a hypothesis.
This interpretation seems quite plausible in view of the two-part structure of
hypothetical arguments. Difficulties, however, arise again when we ask what the
two types of hypothetical arguments have in common. Mignucci seems to assume
that it is the unproven assumption that is characterized as a hypothesis in each
case—the negation of the syllogistic conclusion in the case of reductio and the
conditional premise in the other case, since a syllogistic proof is given for its
antecedent, which forms the second premise of the modus ponens argument. We
noted at the outset, however, that the characterization ἐξ ὑποθέσεως could not
refer merely to the occurrence of an unjustified premise, since these also occur
in ostensive syllogisms insofar as they are not required to count as proofs.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether Aristotle, as Mignucci assumes, thought
of the syllogistic part of the reductio as a proof of a conditional statement. What
is ‘shown’, that is, derived in this specific case, is according to Aristotle the
impossible conclusion, not, say, the sentence ‘if the diagonal is commensurable,
then even and uneven numbers are equal’ (cf. 41a24, 28, 32f.; 50a31). And
according to Aristotle’s own description in B 14 (62b32–35), a reductio presup-
poses two premises that are ‘admitted’ or recognized as true, namely one
premise of the syllogism and the opposite of the conclusion—both of these
are, of course, unproven within the argument. One thus arrives, at best, at the
resigned judgement of Martha Kneale: ‘ “hypothesis” seems here to be his
general name for a statement which plays an essential rôle in an argument
but not as any part of a syllogism nor yet as the conditional formulation of a
syllogism.’¹³
(C) On the third interpretation, which was first proposed by Pacius and has
been defended more recently by Maier and Ross,¹⁴ the hypothesis is not one of the

¹² Ch. Sigwart, Beiträge zur Lehre vom hypothetischen Urteil, Tübingen 1871; Shorey, op. cit., 461;
M. Mignucci, Aristotele, Gli Analitici Primi a cura di M.M., Naples 1969, 424.
¹³ Op. cit., 99.
¹⁴ Cf. I. Pacius, In Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Organum Commentarius Analyticus, Frankfurt
1597 (reprint Hildesheim 1966), 153; H. Maier, Die Syllogistik des Aristoteles, Bd. II 1, Tübingen
1900, 236ff.; W.D. Ross, commentary on ‘Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics’, Oxford 1949, 371f.
    ‘    ’ 9

premises, but rather the logical law that allows one to proceed from ascertaining
the conclusion’s falsity to accepting the demonstrandum. This interpretation also
has textual support: Aristotle says twice in A 23 that the initial thesis is inferred
from a hypothesis ‘when’ (ὅταν) or ‘since’ (ἐπεί) its contradictory gives rise to
something impossible. Ross understands this as an—admittedly inexact—
formulation of the hypothesis, which, spelled out more fully, would say: ‘If from
a proposition something impossible follows, this proposition is false and its
contradictory true.’¹⁵ One need not necessarily take this formulation as an explicit
description of the hypothesis—Ebbinghaus¹⁶ draws attention to the ὅταν, which
seems to suggest that an inference ἐξ ὑποθέσεως is always possible when some-
thing impossible follows, without taking the hypothesis itself to be identified.
These passages are, therefore, not conclusive evidence for this position. Whether,
like Ross, one ought to rely on A 44, according to which a reductio needs no
agreement—for the reason, according to Ross, that the hypothesis is a logical
law—is questionable, for what is there characterized as evident is, of course, not
the logical law, but rather the falsity of the conclusion. On the one hand it does seem
plausible to ground the difference between the two types of hypothetical arguments
in the fact that the transition to the demonstrandum is in one case made possible by a
logical law and in the other by a conditional premise that requires agreement; we
can, however, not be sure that Aristotle meant to claim this. Furthermore, on this
interpretation we run into the difficulty, mentioned also by Ebbinghaus, that the
hypothesis in the reductio is not a part of the argument, but rather a rule which
justifies one of the steps of the proof, whereas in the other case it seems to be a
premise.
This last point brings us back to the arguments of the first type. So far we have
been assuming that these are arguments in modus ponendo ponens. This is
certainly true in view of the example given by Aristotle, but that does not yet
show that Aristotle himself would have described the argument in this way. Now,
it is well known that Aristotle neither explicitly recognized the conditional as a
form of statement nor specifically investigated it. On the contrary: in the first
chapter of the An.Pr. he seems to assume that all premises must be categorical

¹⁵ G. Patzig (Die aristotelische Syllogistik, 3. Aufl., Göttingen 1969, 158, 165) proposes that the law of
excluded middle is the hypothesis. He does so by viewing the syllogism that leads to the impossible as a
proof of the falsity of the first hypothesis (on this see e.g. B 11.62a14–15: δειχθέντος ὅτι οὐχ ἡ ἀπόφασις
ἀνάνγκη τὴν κατάφασιν ἀληθεύεσθαι). Aristotle himself does, in fact, say (An.Po. A 11.77a22; cf. An.Pr.
B 11.62a13) that the proof ad impossibile assumes (λαμβάνει) this law. The syllogism can, however,
prove the falsity of the first hypothesis only if the falsity of the conclusion is assumed—that is, the step
to the negation of the first hypothesis is, strictly speaking, no longer a step of the syllogistic part of the
proof. However, according to Aristotle’s own description, what is ‘shown’ by the syllogism is not the
falsity of the hypothesis but rather the false conclusion. At least in these two chapters the view of Ross
and Maier thus seems to me to be more plausible. Since Aristotle nowhere explicitly formulates the
hypothesis, it seems to me equally likely that he had not consciously distinguished between these two
views.
¹⁶ Op. cit., 43, n. 1.
10    

statements. At least as conclusions of proofs, conditional statements seem not

to be at issue if, as Aristotle holds, ‘every proof and every syllogism must show
something as belonging or not belonging’ (40b23–24). If, however, in
Aristotle’s view both the premises and the conclusions of all valid arguments
must be categorical statements, one needs to ask whether he viewed the
hypothesis of a hypothetical argument as a premise at all. In fact, some things
do indicate that he thought of the hypothesis differently: namely as an
agreement according to which one of two statements will count as proven
when the other is.¹⁷ Those hypotheses are indeed usually formulated as
conditional statements; in A 44, however, we also encounter the formulation
‘if it is proven that . . . , then . . . ’ (50a34–35; cf. also Top. A 18,108b16–17). The
expression τὸ μεταλαμβανόμενον in A 23 suggests something similar. The
μεταλαμβανόμενον is something that is substituted for something else—in the
case of hypothetical arguments, a statement that takes the place of the demon-
strandum. Underlying this seems to be the view that the proof of the substi-
tuted statement takes the place of the proof for the demonstrandum—in
contrast to the contemporary view according to which one would have to
say that the demonstrandum is derived or proven from the conditional premise
together with the ‘substituted’ statement.¹⁸

III

If one does not regard the hypothesis as a premise, then it can at least plausibly be
explained why Aristotle treats the two types of hypothetical syllogisms as a single

¹⁷ Frede (op. cit. 29f.) also arrives at this result when considering the question why Aristotle seems
by all appearances to have thought that only syllogistic arguments in the strict sense fall under his
definition of the syllogism. Cf. also I. Mueller, ‘Greek Mathematics and Greek Logic’, in J. Corcoran
(ed.), Ancient Logic . . . , op. cit. 56f.
¹⁸ In the view of some commentators, the μεταλαμβάνομενον in A 23 is a term that is substituted for
another, not a statement. The word μεταλαμβανόμενα in A 29.45b18 does indeed doubtless refer to the
added terms of the statement; in A 23, however, the juxtaposition of τὸ μεταλαμβανόμενον with τὸ ἐξ
ἀρχῆς seems to indicate that Alexander is correct when he assumes that we are here dealing with the
substituted statement. In any case, this makes no important difference to the interpretation of this
passage. A further difficulty seems to me to stem from the commentators themselves—including
Alexander: They assume that the words ἐν ἅπασι γὰρ . . . κτλ. (41a38) refer to all hypothetical argu-
ments, thus also to reductio, and then they attempt to show how the syllogism of an apagogical
argument also relates to a substitute. It is, however, equally natural to read ἐν ἅπασι as referring only
to the ‘remaining’ hypothetical arguments. To support this reading further one may appeal to the place
in A 29 mentioned above. There Aristotle characterizes direct hypothetical arguments as κατὰ
μετάληψιν ἢ κατὰ ποιότητα, and if one follows the explanation of Alexander (324.22–24), μετάληψις
refers to the substitution of one statement for another. This seems essential to the ‘remaining’
arguments, since Aristotle adds that one must search for the premises of these arguments in view of
the substituted terms. The fact that Aristotle describes both the statement as well as the terms as
μεταλαμβανόμενα is hardly surprising, since additional terms are, of course, introduced with an
additional statement. In a reductio ad impossibile, on the other hand, one requires no
μεταλαμβανόμενα, because the three syllogistic terms are all one needs.
    ‘    ’ 11

class: The formal commonality consists in the fact that, in both the apagogical
arguments as well as in the others, a non-syllogistic rule of deduction is employed.
That is, there is a step that is justified neither by conversion nor by one of the
syllogistic moods. The distinction between the two types, on the other hand,
consists in the fact that the hypothesis corresponds to a logical rule in the case
of the reductio whereas it is a more or less ad hoc, non-logical rule that is agreed
upon in the case of the other hypothetical syllogisms—which was then rightly
treated as a premise by Aristotle’s successors. It is for just this reason that the
second type requires an explicit agreement.
This interpretation also explains the curious fact that Aristotle seems not to
take pure modus ponens arguments into account at all, but rather tacitly assumes
that a syllogism for the second premise—and only for this one—must be con-
structed. If one does not view the conditional hypothesis as a premise, then a pure
modus ponens argument has only a single premise, and therefore, as Aristotle once
again emphatically claims in A 23, cannot represent a complete argument. A proof
of the conditional premise, as suggested by Alexander and Philoponus, can, of
course, for this very reason not be at issue, since a conditional cannot appear as the
conclusion of an argument.
If Aristotle classified reductio ad impossibile as a hypothetical argument for the
reason just given, then what was important for him was less the logical status of
the hypothesis and more the type of logical step that it justifies. From the
standpoint of formal logic, it would otherwise be more natural to separate
formally valid methods of deduction—ostensive syllogisms and reductio ad
impossibile—from formally invalid ones and then, within the group of formally
valid arguments, to distinguish between direct and indirect deductions. For
ostensive deductions, which, in addition to the arguments of the syllogistic
moods, also include the direct conversion proofs of chapters A 4–6 (cf. A
7,29a30–34), what seems to be essential is that each step can be justified by
recourse to the underlying relations of belonging that hold among the terms of
the premises. For the evident validity of the perfect moods, Aristotle appeals to the
meaning of the expressions κατὰ παντός and κατὰ μηδενός respectively (cf. A
4.25b39–40; 26a24, 27). For the imperfect moods, the necessity is made evident
(cf. 24b24 and 27a17) by interposing statements between the premises and
conclusion that are ‘necessary because of the terms laid down’ (24a25; cf. 28a6).
This means, as one can see from the proofs of chapters A 4–6, that they are derived
using the conversion rules. Aristotle adds for completeness in A 5,28a6–7 that the
apagogical proofs use an additional ‘hypothesis’. These proofs are, however, not
ostensive. For ostensive proofs it must, therefore, be the case that they only
contain such statements as intermediate steps that are necessary ‘because of the
terms’. Now, the conversion rules explicitly refer to specific relations among
terms, and the perfect moods are also based on these relations, as we have seen.
A difficulty for this view seems, however, to arise from the fact that some of the
12    

imperfect moods—Baroco in the second figure and Bocardo in the third—cannot

be proven by means of conversion. Both are proven by Aristotle using reductio ad
impossibile. In these cases one cannot say that the deduction uses only sentences
that are ‘necessary because of the terms’. To put it another way, the proofs of these
moods do show that the conclusion follows from the premises, but they do not
show that the conclusion follows simply ‘on the basis of the terms assumed’.
Strictly speaking, one should not therefore, it seems, consider these moods to be
ostensive. Aristotle, however, clearly treats all syllogisms in the narrow sense as
ostensive arguments.
Alexander (24, 12–18) and Philoponus (37, 16–38, 29), who both address this
question, try to make do with the observation that the additional hypothesis only
serves to derive the impossibility, not the actual conclusion. But this hardly helps,
since it shows precisely that the conclusion itself is, in these cases, derived ἐξ
ὑποθέσεως. Elsewhere (318, 17ff.), Alexander entertains the possibility that, after
one has proven the validity of a mood by reductio, one can then use this mood as
an ostensive argument: ἢ καὶ ἐπὶ τούτων εἴη ἂν μετὰ τὴν πίστιν τὴν διὰ τῆς εἰς
ἀδύνατον ἀπαγωγῆς τοῦ συλλογιστικὴν εἶναι τὴν συμπλοκὴν καὶ ἐκ τῶν κειμένων
προτάσεων δεικτικῶς δεικνύμενον τὸ προκείμενον—that is, Aristotle could have
understood δεικτικῶς in the sense of ‘direct’. As noted at the beginning, Aristotle
in fact uses the expressions δεικτικῶς, δεικτικός etc. in some places to contrast
with διὰ τοῦ αδυνάτου, and thus presumably in the sense of ‘direct’, while in other
places he uses it as a contrast to ἐξ ὑποθέσεως. It is, therefore, possible that
syllogisms might be viewed as ostensive in the first instance because they are
direct arguments. That, however, would not justify Aristotle in viewing them all as
ostensive rather than hypothetical, for if the validity of some moods can only be
shown through a hypothetical argument, this would mean that the conclusion in
these cases could not be derived solely by recourse to the relations assumed to hold
between the terms. Aristotle does not address this problem himself, but he does
mention in connection with the apagogical proof of Bocardo (A 6.28b20) that one
can also carry out the proof without (!) reductio ad impossibile—namely by
ἔκθεσις. The same holds of Baroco, although Aristotle does not actually say so.
If one counts ἔκθεσις as an ostensive deductive step, then there is indeed an
ostensive proof for every syllogistic mood within Aristotle’s system, and
Aristotle is justified in treating every syllogism in the strict sense as an ostensive
argument.
That ἔκθεσις is an ostensive deductive step in the relevant sense is fairly clear,
since the ‘setting out’ is grounded in the relation between terms contained in one
of the premises. It makes no difference whether the thing ‘set out’ is to be
understood as a term or as an individual constant.¹⁹

¹⁹ On ἔκθεσις see Patzig, op. cit. 166ff. and W. Wieland, ‘Review of Patzig, Die aristotelische
Syllogistik’, Philos. Rundschau 14, 1966, 24f.
    ‘    ’ 13

One can also not object that in this procedure a term is added ‘from outside’
(ἔξωθεν, 24b21), since what we have here is a term or individual that is subordin-
ated to one of the given terms. The fact that ἔκθεσις can also appear in an indirect
proof (as in the proof for the conversion of universal negative premises,
A 2,25a14–17) also does not provide evidence against this view, since by ἔκθεσις
Aristotle, of course, does not mean a procedure by means of which one might
prove a given proposition, but rather—just as in the case of conversion—merely
an operation that is applied to a particular premise. Neither conversion nor
ἔκθεσις, therefore, count as deductive procedures on the same level as the syllo-
gistic moods or reductio—on their own, they cannot be the basis for a complete
argument. It is thus, incidentally, also entirely correct for Aristotle not to mention
ἔκθεσις in his considerations regarding completeness in A 23.
While, therefore, each step in an ostensive deduction can be justified by
recourse to the relations among terms, it is characteristic of the hypothetical
part of the reductio as well as of the remaining hypothetical arguments that the
internal structure of the premises plays no role.
The principle that a statement is false if something absurd follows from it
clearly does not refer to any particular type of statement, and a conditional may
contain arbitrary statements as its substatements. This suggests that Aristotle
speaks of a hypothesis, rather than a syllogism in the stricter sense, precisely
when a deductive step needs to be justified by recourse to the relations of
implication between statements (of any sort) rather than by taking into account
the term relations at hand. The combining of reductio with direct hypothetical
arguments seems to show that the decisive point for characterizing a step of a
proof as hypothetical is that the implication is independent of the relations among
the terms. One could thus describe hypothetical arguments as those that employ a
rule that is not grounded in the relations among its terms.
This is not to say that Aristotle intended to characterize this kind of non-
syllogistic rule explicitly with the word ὑπόθεσις. In order to claim this, we would
need to assume that he had consciously distinguished between premises and rules
of deduction, and that seems rather doubtful.²⁰ Nevertheless, it can, I think, be
shown that Aristotle does not treat the hypothesis as a premise, and in actual fact
the hypothesis is best treated as a rule.
We pointed out above that Aristotle probably took over the expression ἐξ
ὑποθέσεως from the Academy. This label could hardly have originally referred
to what Aristotle views as the relevant formal trait, for the simple reason that
Aristotelian formal syllogistic did not yet exist. The later way of talking about
hypothetical syllogisms shows that the characterization was taken to refer to the
if–then form of the hypothesis. This is not a possible interpretation of Aristotle

²⁰ See, for example, An.Po. A 10,76b10–22 with the commentary of J. Barnes (Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics, Oxford 1975), 135, 138f.
14    

since his reductio arguments, at least, do not contain a conditional premise. Now,
rules of inference are often formulated as if–then sentences, but this also applies to
rules by which an inference is made in an ostensive syllogism, and therefore this
cannot be viewed as the defining characteristic of hypothetical arguments either. It
seems that what is important for Aristotle is that one goes from one proposition to
another ‘on the basis of a hypothesis’ without taking into account the internal
structure of these propositions. The status of this kind of convention is not
something that Aristotle seems to have investigated.

IV

In view of the completeness claim of chapter A 23, we still need to inquire into the
extent to which Aristotle’s formal analysis is applicable to the sorts of arguments
that he wants it to encompass. For reductio arguments it is easy to see that
Aristotle’s description only applies to a certain type—namely syllogisms διὰ τοῦ
ἀδυνάτου as described in B 11–14 and the indirect proofs of A 5 and 6. Even if we
were to grant that every step of the proof of the incommensurability of the
diagonal, which Aristotle uses as an example, could be put in syllogistic form,
this argument, which seems to lead to an explicit contradiction, would still need to
consist of at least two syllogisms and a hypothetical step. Aristotle, however,
formulates the conclusion so imprecisely—‘odd numbers will be equal to even
numbers’—that one is rather inclined to conjecture that he did not even try to
apply his analysis to the mathematician’s incommensurability proof.²¹
Direct hypothetical arguments are, according to the passages discussed here,
characterized not only by the fact that they make use of an ‘agreement’, but also by
the fact that within them one proposition is substituted for another and proven, so
to speak, in its place. The expression μεταλαμβανόμενον suggests that the substi-
tuted proposition is meant to be equivalent to the proposition whose place it takes,
which would imply that it could also be refuted in place of the original thesis. This
is precisely what seems to be the case with the example in Top. Γ 6, 119b35, and
also in A 44, where the hypothesis is given once in the form ‘if not p, then not q’
and a second time in the form ‘if p, then q’ (cf. 50a19–20 and 34–35 respectively).
However, this does not seem to hold true in all cases, for, as Aristotle himself notes
(Top. Γ 6.119b21–24), arguments ἀπὸ τοῦ ἧττον (‘from the less so’) can be used
‘only for proving, not for refuting’—that is, the implication here holds only in one
direction.²²

²¹ Cf. Mueller, op. cit., 56.

²² Alexander of Aphrodisias claims that arguments ἀπὸ τοῦ μᾶλλον καὶ τοῦ ἧττον καὶ ὁμοίου are
hypothetical (265.30ff., 324.19f.). He identifies them with the arguments κατὰ ποιότητα in A 29.45b17.
I see no reason to doubt Alexander’s interpretation, especially since Aristotle himself describes
arguments ἀπὸ τοῦ ὁμοίου as ἐξ ὑποθέσεως in Top. A 18,108b12ff.
    ‘    ’ 15

The few remaining examples of this type of argument, which Aristotle explicitly
characterizes as hypothetical (Top. A 18.108b12ff.; Γ 6,119b35ff.; An.Po. B 6,92a7ff.,
20ff.), suffice to show that the formal analysis indicated represents a simplification,
stemming primarily from the fact that Aristotle in each case only seems to be taking
into consideration one part of the complete argument. This was noted above regard-
ing the example from A 44. The other four cases can be characterized generally as
follows: In each case Aristotle proceeds from a universal premise about a particular
domain—for example, the domain of similar things, or pairs of opposites, or even of
the class of objects to which the subject of the thesis in question belongs.²³ By using
this premise the conditional proposition is then derived, which seems to play the role
of a hypothesis. Now, if the antecedent of this conditional is proven, then the
consequent must also count as proven. Clearly, Aristotle’s analysis can only be
applied to the part of the argument that begins with the conditional ‘hypothesis’. In
no case is a proof offered for its antecedent—according to A 23 and 44 this would
have to be a syllogism, but this is, as the example of A 44 has already shown, highly
dubious. According to the description of Top. A 18, an argument about ‘similar
things’ would need to look something like this:

(What holds of one of two similar things, holds of the other. a and b are similar to
each other)
If a is F, then b is also F. (hypothesis)
P₁
P₂
a is F (μεταλαμβανόμενον; proven using a syllogism from P₁, P₂)
(Conclusion) b is F (from the hypothesis)

While the text of this passage seems to emphasize that the hypothesis is the
conditional derived from the universal premise, Aristotle speaks in other cases
as if the universal premise were itself the hypothesis. In An.Po. B 6,92a20ff., the
part of the argument bracketed above is explicitly expounded; this argument
proceeds as follows:

(H) If A, B and C, D are opposites and A is defined by C, then B is defined by D.

1) a, b, and c, d are opposites
2) a is defined by c
(C) b is defined by d.

²³ Cf. Top. A 18.108b13: ὥς ποτε ἐφ’ ἐνὸς τῶν ὁμοίων ἒχει, οὕτως καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν λοιπῶν; Top. Γ
6.119b35: ὁμοίως ἀξιώσαντα, εἰ ἑνί, καὶ πᾶσιν ὑπάρχειν ἢ μὴ ὑπάρχειν; An.Po. B 6.92a7: λαβόντα τὸ μὲν
τί ἧν εἶναι τό ἐκ τῶν ἐν τῷ τί ἐστιν ἴδιον; 92a21: τὸ δ’ ἐναντίῳ τὸ τῷ ἐναντίῳ <ἐναντίῳ> εἶναι.
16    

If one tries to apply the schema from A 44 to this argument, then one must
presumably follow Maier²⁴ in viewing 2) as the μεταλαμβανόμενον. The hypoth-
esis, which here, however, does not appear explicitly, would need to be: ‘If a is
defined by c, then b is defined by d’. Aristotle seems, however, in this case to view
the universal premise itself as the hypothesis.
It is possible that Aristotle did not view the transition from the general to the
particular hypothesis as a step of the derivation, but rather as a sort of contraction
of the universal principle to the particular case, in the way he does for the ‘general
principles’ of sciences (cf. An.Po. A 10,76a37–b2; A 11,77a22–24). Thus both the
universal principle as well as the specific implicative premise can be characterized
as (the) hypothesis. This is how, for example, Alexander (324,24–31; cf. 325,3–8)
proceeds when he first gives the universal principle as what is assumed—‘it is
assumed (ὑποτίθεται) that if what would seem to be more sufficient for happiness
is not sufficient, then neither would what is less so than it be sufficient’ (εἰ ὃ μᾶλλον
ἂν δόξαι αὔταρκες εἶναι πρὸς εὐδαιμονίαν, τοῦτο μή ἐστιν αὔταρκες, οὐδὲ τὸ ἧττον
ἐκείνου εἴη ἂν αὔταρκες’), but then later the derived conditional ‘that wealth is not
sufficient for happiness, given that even health is not, has been assumed
(ὑπόκειται)’ (324.29–30: τὸ μὲν μὴ εἶναι τὸν πλοῦτον αὐτάρκη πρὸς εὐδαιμονίαν,
εἴ γε μηδὲ ἡ ὑγίεια, ὑπόκειται) without so much as indicating the difference.²⁵
Now, it is doubtless no coincidence that this example represents one of the
typical forms of argument in the Topics.²⁶ The typical procedure of refutation by
modus tollens, where a thesis is refuted by showing one of its consequences to be
false, seems at first not to be captured by this sort of argument. However, one can,
of course, transform a modus tollens argument into an argument in modus ponens
by contraposition of the conditional premise; that is, instead of arguing ‘if p, then
q; not q; therefore, not p’, one can start with the premise ‘if not q, then not p’. We
may thus assume that Aristotle meant to bring together the arguments of the
Topics under the rubric of syllogisms ἐξ ὑποθέσεως, which he evidently realized
could not be put into syllogistic form. Although his analysis of these arguments
represents, as we have seen, a simplification, it nevertheless at least appears to
capture an important formal characteristic.
Given the types of arguments Aristotle explicitly recognized, the completeness
thesis of chapter An.Pr. A 23 is, of course, not justified. That Aristotle seems not to
have noticed this may be due to the inexactness of his treatment, which, as he
himself notes, is provisional; however, the more significant factor seems to be that

²⁴ Op. cit., 260, n. 1.

²⁵ Theophrastus seems to have distinguished things more clearly here in his definition of τόπος
(apud Al.Aphr. in Top. 5.21–26). He defines a τόπος as a principle or element from which we extract the
principles (i.e. premises?) about each kind of thing (ἔστι γὰρ ὁ τόπος, ὡς λέγει Θεόφραστος, ἀρχή τις ἢ
στοιχεῖον, ἀφ’ οῦ λαμβάνομεν τὰς περὶ ἕκαστον ἀρχάς ἐπιστήσαντες τὴν διάνοιαν, τῇ περιγραφῇ μὲν
ὡρισμένος . . . τοῖς δὲ καθ’ ἕκαστα ἀόριστος). Incidentally, the definition also seems to show that
Theophrastus did not view the universal principle as a part of the argument.
²⁶ See J. Brunschwig, Introduction to: Aristote, Topiques, vol. I, Paris 1967, XLff.
    ‘    ’ 17

he did not recognize the conditional as a special sort of statement, and therefore
treated the ‘hypothesis’ as an ‘agreement’ outside of the actual course of the proof
rather than as one of its premises—or, to put it differently, he only took relations
among terms into account as logical constants, not propositional connectives. In
this way he could arrive at the claim at the end of A 23 that even hypothetical
arguments are (dependent on) syllogisms insofar as each of them must at least
contain a syllogism.²⁷

²⁷ I am grateful to Professors G. Patzig and W. Carl for criticism and discussion.

 2
Necessity with Gaps
Aristotle on the Contingency of Natural Processes

In chapter A 13 of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle describes statements about what

happens for the most part or by nature as contingency statements. He explains that
in those cases the necessity has gaps, because natural processes may be interrupted.
A few lines later he claims that there may be demonstrative knowledge of such cases,
unlike mere coincidences. This clearly conflicts with his claim in the Posterior
Analytics that only necessary truths can be known in the strict sense and that the
premises of demonstrations must also be necessary. The apparent contradiction
could be avoided if statements about natural events were understood as conditionals
with an antecedent of the form ‘there is no obstacle’. But the limited syntax of
Aristotle’s syllogistic did not allow him to see those statements as anything but
contingently true.

Aristotle is the first philosopher to have given a precise definition of the

contingent and thus to have introduced this as an explicit philosophical
concept. His famous argument against determinism (de int. 9), with which
he sought to defend the contingency of future events, has given rise to a flood
of discussion and commentary since antiquity. By contrast, his formal
theory of contingency statements in the Analytica Priora (An.Pr.) has garnered
less attention—unsurprisingly, given that it seems to be an obvious failure
and was rejected by Aristotle’s own students. The following contribution
makes no attempt to render Aristotle’s modal syllogistic consistent and
plausible—such an attempt could hardly succeed. It does, however, aim to
show why Aristotle ever embarked on this difficult and ultimately unsuccessful
undertaking.
According to one of Aristotle’s well-known doctrines, there can be scientific
knowledge in two domains: Of things that always behave in the same way, and of
things that ‘for the most part’ (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ) or ‘by nature’ (φύσει) behave in
the same way. There can be no scientific knowledge of things that occur ‘by
chance’ (ἀπὸ τύχης) (Met. E 2,1027a19–28; cf. An.Pr. A 13,32b18–22; Phys. B
5,197a19–20). This is because science refers to the universal and seeks out causes

From Aristotle to Cicero: Essays on Ancient Philosophy. Gisela Striker, Oxford University Press. © Gisela Striker 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868385.003.0002
    19

and explanations. Something that happens by sheer chance, like the fact that
someone stumbles on treasure while digging in his garden (Met. Δ 30,1025a6), can
receive no explanation that refers to just these occurrences under these descrip-
tions. One could perhaps explain why someone is digging in the garden (e.g. to
loosen soil for the plants) and also why there is treasure in this spot (because
someone else buried it there years ago so as to hide it from plundering soldiers).
Both, however, offer no general explanation for the fact that people find treasure
while digging in the garden.
The objects of most natural sciences belong to the domain of things that behave for
the most part, but not always, in the same way. In particular, this is true of biology.
The reason organisms do not always behave in the same way is clearly that the
development of plants and animals depends on all sorts of external factors in such a
way that unforeseeable disruptions may occur. Nevertheless, such disruptions are
the exception and not the rule, and thus one can find explanations in this domain that
apply to most cases even if not to all. So far, Aristotle’s theory is plausible and
uncontroversial, or so it seems to me. In the context of Aristotle’s philosophy of
science, however, this theory faces a difficulty. Namely, this theory stands in contra-
diction with the official doctrine of the Analytica Posteriora (An.Po.). According to
the first chapters of the An.Po., the premises and theorems of each science must be
universal necessity statements describing the objects of the particular science (the
underlying genus) and their per se properties (that is, the properties they have on
account of their definitions). Statements about what occurs ‘for the most part’ are,
however, neither necessary nor universal in Aristotle’s view. How is it that they can
nevertheless serve as scientific premises? What, for instance, could be the scientific
status of the statement that grapevines lose their leaves in autumn?
It may be that the striking contradiction arose in the course of the development
of Aristotle’s theory. One may hold this whether, like Solmsen¹, one views the
inclusion of natural sciences in his theory as a revolutionary innovation by a
renegade Platonist or whether, like Barnes², one views them as the remnants of an
earlier, more ‘liberal’ conception of science. This, of course, does not imply that
Aristotle never noticed the problem. The conjecture of Joachim³ that statements
that hold merely for the most part are to be reckoned as merely provisional and
must be replaced by necessity statements in a ‘real’ science is not supported by
Aristotle’s explicit pronouncements on the topic. It is also not straightforwardly
compatible with the text of the An.Po. There, Aristotle expressly says in at least
one place that ‘some principles (ἀρχαί) are necessary and others contingent’

¹ F. Solmsen, Die Entwicklung der aristotelischen Logik und Rhetorik, Berlin 1929,138–41.
² Proof and the Syllogism, in: E. Berti (ed.), Aristotle on Science: The “Posterior Analytics”, Padova
1981, 50ff.
³ H.H. Joachim, Aristotle on Coming-to-be and Passing-away, text, introduction and commentary by
H.H.J., Oxford U.P. 1922, Introduction, xxviif.
20    

(88b7). This, of course, contradicts the claim of the earlier chapter, but that can
hardly be explained by supposing that Aristotle did not intend to recognize ‘for
the most part’ statements as genuine scientific statements.
The most plausible explanation for the remark about the different kinds of
scientific principles is no doubt that Aristotle is referring here to his statement
regarding the status of natural scientific premises in An.Pr. A 13⁴. According to
that chapter, statements about what occurs ‘for the most part’ or ‘by nature’ are to
be counted among possibility statements in the strict sense of contingency state-
ments. In that same passage, Aristotle also reiterates his claim that what occurs for
the most part or by nature does admit of knowledge and even of syllogistic
demonstration. This is also the only place where Aristotle speaks about the logical
status of natural scientific generalizations. For these reasons, it seems plausible to
begin with this passage in asking whether, and how, Aristotle meant to classify
natural sciences as sciences in the strict sense, given the broader context of his
philosophy of science.
The passage in question (An.Pr. A 13,32a16–b23) occurs in the introduction to
Aristotle’s treatment of syllogisms with possibility premises. It begins with the
famous definition of the possible in the strict sense: ‘By “being possible” and “the
possible” I mean that which, while not being necessary, will not lead to anything
impossible when it is assumed to belong.’ With this definition, Aristotle commits
himself to a ‘two-sided’ conception of possibility for the sequel: What is possible,
in this sense, is what is neither necessarily so nor necessarily not so. The ‘one-
sided’ conception of possibility, which only rules out impossibility but includes
necessity, it explicitly laid aside. (In the following, I will adopt the convention that
‘contingent’ always refers to two-sided possibility and I will use ‘possible’ for a
one-sided possibility, except for quotations). The formulation of this definition
shows that Aristotle is here thinking of the possible holding of predicates. He is
defining the usage of ‘possible’ and ‘possibly’ in syllogistic statements of the form
‘A possibly belongs to every/some/not all/no B.’ Aristotle goes on to prove that
there are special conversion rules for contingency statements thus defined, which
apply neither to necessity statements nor to assertoric ones: Statements of the
form ‘A possibly belongs to every B’ and ‘A possibly belongs to no B’ are, due to
the definition of possibility, equivalent, and likewise for statements of the form ‘A
possibly belongs to some B’ and ‘A possibly does not belong to some B’. Since
Ross⁵, these rules have been referred to as the rules of complementary conversion.
After the proof of complementary conversion, there then follows a remark
concerning the domains in which contingency statements are employed
(32b4–23):

⁴ Cf. J. Barnes, Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration’, Phronesis 14, 1969, 134,n.51.

⁵ In his commentary in W. D. Ross, ‘Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics’, ed. maior w.
commentary, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1949.
    21

After these explanations, let us add that ‘being possible’ is said in two ways: in
one way of what happens for the most part, when the necessity has gaps, such as
that a man turns grey or grows or ages, or generally what belongs by nature. For
this has no continuous necessity because a man does not exist forever, but while a
man exists, it happens either of necessity or for the most part. In another way
‘being possible’ is said of what is indeterminate, that is, what is possible both this
way and not this way, such as that an animal walks or that an earthquake
happens while it walks, or, generally, what comes about by chance, for this is
by nature no more this way than the opposite way. Both these kinds of being
possible also convert with respect to opposite premises, but not in the same way.
Rather, what is so by nature converts because it does not belong of necessity (for
in this way it is possible for a man not to turn grey), while the indeterminate
converts because it is no more this way than that.
There is no knowledge or demonstrative syllogism of indeterminate things
because the middle term is irregular, but there is knowledge of things that happen
by nature, and by and large arguments and investigations are concerned with
what is possible in this way. For the other sort a syllogism may come about, but
one does not usually try to find one.
These things will be explained more precisely later.

As the last sentence shows, this is a provisional note; Aristotle promises to return
to the problem. The promise is, however, fulfilled neither in the Analytics nor in
any other passage of Aristotle’s preserved corpus. For the question of the logical
status of statements about what takes place ‘by nature’ or ‘for the most part’, we
are thus confined to the terse remarks of this passage.
Aristotle’s students and the ancient commentators evidently took Aristotle to
be drawing a distinction between two meanings of ‘possible’ (contingent) in these
clarificatory remarks, corresponding to the expressions ‘for the most part’ or ‘by
nature’ and ‘by chance’ respectively. Accordingly, statements in which these
expressions occur are contingency statements, and the same rules apply to them
as do to explicit contingency statements. On this interpretation, the subsequent
chapters, in which the theory of inferences with contingency premises is devel-
oped, are of scientific interest because they at once deliver a theory of inferences
with ‘for the most part’ premises, which are needed in the natural sciences.
This view has been defended more recently by Jonathan Barnes⁶; it appears,
however, as Barnes himself concedes, to misfire from the outset on account of an
obvious difficulty: Statements of the form ‘B’s are mostly A’ cannot in general be
converted using the rule of complementary conversion, since from ‘B’s are mostly

⁶ Sheep Have Four Legs, Proceedings of the World Congress on Aristotle vol. III, Athens 1982,
113–119.
22    

A’ it clearly does not follow that ‘B’s are mostly not A’. Theophrastus and
Eudemus are said to have rejected complementary conversion for this reason
(Ps.—Amm. in An.Pr. 45.42–46.2). This shows, on the one hand, that they thought
the syllogistic of contingency statements was meant to apply to premises of
natural sciences; on the other hand, it shows that they found the conception of
possibility developed by Aristotle unfit for this purpose. We need not concern
ourselves here further with the alternatives that Theophrastus and Eudemus
developed.
It is hard to believe that Aristotle himself would have overlooked such an
obvious objection, especially since he explicitly considers the question of comple-
mentary conversion. Nevertheless, as Becker (op. cit. 77) emphasized, the expres-
sions ‘for the most part’ and ‘by nature’ do not occur again in the following
chapters, while complementary conversion is used constantly. Becker inferred
from this observation that the remark about the premises of natural sciences
(32b18–22) presumably did not originate with Aristotle himself. Rather,
Aristotle’s preceding note concerning complementary conversion was intended
precisely to draw our attention to the fact that the syllogistic of contingency
statements is not suited to function as a logic of ‘for the most part’ statements.
This note could, however, have been inserted later, when Aristotle—perhaps
prompted by the objections of his students—noticed the discrepancy. A later
editor, according to Becker, failed to understand this and rewrote the text,
resulting in the version that we have received.
Needless to say, conjectures of inauthenticity are, particularly in the case of
difficult texts, practically always a last resort. In this case, such a conjecture does
not seem to me to be necessary. One can understand Aristotle’s thesis concerning
the different usages of ‘possibly’ in a different way, as Hintikka⁷ has shown—not
in the sense that ‘possibly’ has the same meaning as ‘for the most part’ or ‘by
chance’, but rather as saying that statements of contingency hold in two types of
case—when something happens ‘for the most part’ or ‘by nature’, and when
something occurs by sheer chance. A statement of the form ‘all B’s are possibly
A’ will then be true both when B’s are for the most part or by nature A, and when
they are coincidentally A, without needing to claim that such contingency state-
ments state the same thing as the statements ‘B’s are mostly A’ or ‘all B’s are
coincidentally A’. This interpretation is, in substance at least, more plausible than
the first one, and it is able to explain Aristotle’s remark about complementary
conversion in the passage in question (32b13–18): It is not being claimed there
that statements in which the expression ‘for the most part’ occurs can be con-
verted (which would obviously be untenable). Rather, all that is being claimed is
that, in both of the aforementioned sorts of case, ‘all B’s are possibly A’ as well as

⁷ J. Hintikka, ‘Aristotle’s Different Possibilities’, in: Hintikka, Time and Necessity, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1973, 34f.
    23

the equivalent ‘all B’s are possibly not-A’ holds, even if not for the same reason. In
the first case, if a predicate applies by nature or for the most part, the conversion
rule applies because it is not necessary that all B’s are A; in the second case, it
applies because B’s could just as well be A as not-A.
Even supposing this interpretation to be correct, there remains the question of
whether Aristotle considered his possibility-syllogistic to be also a formal theory of
scientific proof. Granting that Aristotle recognized expressions like ‘for the most
part’ and ‘by nature’ do not mean the same as ‘possibly’, he could still have
claimed that whenever we have ‘for the most part’ statements as premises, a
syllogistic deduction taking the form of a syllogism from contingency premises
can be constructed. This is, however, not a thesis with broad ramifications. It says
merely that a contingency conclusion, at least, can be derived from ‘for the most
part’ premises, and it remains unclear whether this conclusion can likewise be
treated as a ‘for the most part’ statement. One could equally say that from
necessity premises an assertoric conclusion can be deduced, because the necessary
belongs to the domain of things that are in fact the case. It requires a further
argument to establish the more important claim that a necessity follows as a
conclusion from necessity premises.
In the passage we are considering, however, it is precisely the possibility of a
syllogistic deduction that seems to be at issue for Aristotle. One requirement for
scientific knowledge—perhaps the most important one—is that one has a proof of
what one claims to know. According to Aristotle, this proof must take the form of
a syllogistic deduction. It is indeed a further condition that the premises must be
necessity statements. Yet if one has only ‘for the most part’ statements available, as
is plainly supposed to be the case in many natural sciences, it remains nevertheless
important to establish that a syllogistic derivation is at least possible. One may
then go on to ask whether from ‘for the most part’ premises ‘for the most part’
conclusions follow. In the end, Aristotle seems to suggest that in such cases there
perhaps is a kind of necessity after all, even if not a continuous one. There is,
rather, an ‘interrupted’ (32b6) necessity.⁸ I will return to this point below.
It seems to me that there are indeed indications that Aristotle was attempting to
demonstrate the possibility of syllogistic deductions in the domain of the contin-
gent, and thus also in the domain of natural science. That Aristotle upheld the
validity of syllogisms with contingency premises at all is at least as astonishing as
the thesis that the premises of natural sciences are contingency statements. In a
way, the former is actually much more surprising than the latter. Aristotle’s claim

⁸ Jonathan Barnes has drawn my attention to the fact that Aristotle’s expression can also be
understood in such a way that an ‘interrupted’ necessity is no necessity at all, just like a cancelled
race is not a race of a special kind, but rather no race. Two things, I think, speak against this: First, that
Aristotle immediately goes on to speak of necessity again with regard to grey hair and signs of age.
Second, that certain cases of natural necessity, which Aristotle himself characterizes in this way, can in
fact hardly be understood in any other way than as cases of necessity with gaps (see below).
24    

that natural science makes use of contingency statements as premises stands in

contradiction only with his own theory, a view which he might well have softened
in response to the counterexample of natural science. By contrast, the assumption
that one can syllogistically derive any conclusion at all from two contingency
premises is in substance difficult to justify and seems, on first sight, to be entirely
implausible. It seems almost easier to find counterexamples to the moods Aristotle
accepts as valid than it is to find counterexamples to the moods whose invalidity is
not immediately obvious⁹. And so McCall¹⁰ (88) laconically explains that Aristotle
overlooked the fact that when two statements are each individually possible, it
does not follow that their conjunction is also possible. This impression can hardly
be avoided so long as one sticks to examples that are also contingency statements
in the contemporary sense. If, however, one considers examples in which both
premises are plausible statements of the form ‘all B’s are by nature A’, then
counterexamples no longer seem to arise. Now, at the end of An.Pr. chapter
A 13, Aristotle introduces an interpretation of universal contingency statements
under which, as Becker (op.cit. 32–37) has shown¹¹, the moods of the first figure
recognized as valid do in fact come out as formally valid inferences. Aristotle
claims that one can understand a statement of the form ‘A possibly belongs to
each B’ in such a way that it is not only claimed that A holds possibly of everything
that is B, but rather that A holds possibly of everything that can be B (32b23–32).
The assumption that the predicate term (possibly) covers everything possibly
falling under the subject term may have to do with the fact that Aristotle was
thinking of cases in which the one applies to the other by nature, even if not
necessarily. That is, if B’s are taken to be A by nature, it is natural to assume that
nothing can be B unless it at least could be A. The difference in meaning between
‘possibly’ and ‘by nature’ nevertheless remains intact, since if, for example, it
should be the case that all B’s are possibly A (because they are A by nature), one
can nevertheless still say that all B’s are possibly not-A—not, however, that they
are not A by nature.
A similar interpretative postulate to the one at the end of chapter A 13 is found
in An.Pr. A 15 (34b7–18). There, Aristotle deals with a counterexample to the
mood¹² AaB, QBaC > QAaC: One might have thought that the clearly invalid
argument ‘everything that moves is human; every horse is possibly moving;
therefore, every horse is possibly human’ was an instance of this mood. As with

⁹ Cf. W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford U.P. 1962, 87–9.
¹⁰ S. McCall, Aristotle’s Modal Syllogisms, Amsterdam 1963, 88.
¹¹ See also J. Hintikka, ‘Aristotle’s Different Possibilities’, in: Hintikka, Time and Necessity, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1973, 38–40.
¹² In what follows, I use the notation which has now become standard for syllogistic statements:
A and B stand for the predicate and subject term respectively, a, e, i, and o respectively for the
expressions ‘belongs to all’, ‘belongs to no’, ‘belongs to some’, and ‘does not belong to some’. AxB
stands for an arbitrary statement of one of these four forms. The modal operators are: N (necessarily),
Q (contingently) and M (possibly).
    25

many of Aristotle’s examples of terms, this argument contains a premise that is

not obviously true in a time-independent way, but which, rather, might hold at a
particular time—specifically, in a situation in which it is only humans that move
(34b12). Aristotle now postulates that the assertoric premises should not be ‘with
a limitation of time’, and thus successfully excludes this and similar counterexam-
ples. He also claims that one normally uses only temporally unrestricted assertoric
premises in syllogisms (‘for it is through premises of this sort that we construct the
syllogisms’, 34b9). This surely does not apply to the examples of terms that
Aristotle himself constantly uses in the Analytics; it is more comprehensible if
he is at this point thinking of a deduction in the context of a science, where
temporally limited statements are indeed not permitted.
In both A 13 and in A 15 one gets the impression that Aristotle has imposed a
rule of interpretation after the fact in order to secure his theory against natural
objections.¹³ In both cases, the added assumptions are intelligible if one supposes
that Aristotle is thinking of premises of natural scientific arguments.
Now, if, as we are assuming, Aristotle was clear that ‘for the most part’ and ‘by
nature’ do not have the same meaning as ‘possibly’, and if it turned out to be so
difficult to verify syllogisms with contingency premises as valid, why did he then
not attempt to construct a syllogistic of ‘for the most part’ or ‘by nature’ state-
ments? The answer to this question is, I think: Because these statements cannot, or
can only with great difficulty, be brought into the form of syllogistic premises.
Treating them as contingency statements probably seemed to Aristotle to be the
only possibility for reducing them to a system of modal syllogisms. This could, in
any case, be justified by the fact that they imply the corresponding contingency
statements.
The syllogistic requires statements in the four standard forms AaB, AeB, AiB,
and AoB, with or without additional modal operators; at least one universal
premise is required for each valid syllogism. Since Aristotle seemed in the first
instance to envision scientific syllogisms only in the mood of Barbara, we can here
restrict ourselves to the question of how one can formulate a ‘for the most part’ or
‘by nature’ statement as a universal affirmative statement of the form AaB. Here
I will treat the two expressions ‘for the most part’ and ‘by nature’, which are, of
course, not synonymous, separately. For the sake of brevity, I will use the letters Ω
and Φ for ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ and φύσει respectively.
It is not clear to what extent Aristotle himself took the difference of meaning
into account in the Analytics. At A 3, 24b14 the two expressions are joined with an

¹³ After the fact: It would lead us too far astray to do so here, but it can be shown that Aristotle does
not presuppose or take into account his postulates at the outset. This is especially clear, of course, in the
case of his examples of terms. As regards the interpretation of universal contingency statements, it can
be shown that they do indeed justify the moods treated in Α 14, but that other parts of the contingency
syllogistic must then be invalid if this interpretation is to be taken across the board. On this see Becker,
op. cit. 32–7, 57–9.
26    

‘and’ that is probably to be understood in an explicative sense; at A 13, 32b7

Aristotle summarizes his description of that which occurs for the most part with
the phrase ‘or generally what belongs by nature’ (ἢ ὅλως τὸ πεφυκὸς ὑπάρχειν).
This is not to say that Aristotle takes ‘for the most part’ and ‘by nature’ to be
synonyms; it rather seems to show that he is discussing ‘for the most part’
statements insofar as ‘by nature’ statements belong to this class. He must have
been primarily aiming to establish the latter such statements as premises of
scientific argument, with an eye to the natural sciences.
The expression ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ (for the most part) is, as with many of Aristotle’s
semi-technical expressions, used in various contexts that suggest different inter-
pretations¹⁴. In some places Ω is used as a kind of quantifier, like ‘all’ or ‘some’. It
is clear that this usage does not suffice for a syllogistic of such statements, since, on
this interpretation, one can at most obtain particular premises. Aristotle even
seems to assume in certain places that universal statements are logically ruled out
(Top. B 6,112b5–9; An.Po. II 12.96a10–11)¹⁵.
In many places Ω appears alongside ἀεί (always) as a quantifier over times;
these are above all the places mentioned at the opening of this essay, in which
Aristotle distinguishes what is amenable to science from pure chance, of which
there can be no scientific knowledge. This interpretation likewise fails to take
universal statements into account, since ‘B’s are for the most part A’ clearly does
not mean the same as ‘at most points in time, all B’s are A’s’, since the first
statement can be true even when there is no point in time at which all B’s are A,
and Aristotle seems even to assume himself that the B’s are never actually all A.¹⁶
Both quantitative usages occur together in the Rhetoric (A 2,1357a34–b1;
B 25,1402b13ff.) in order to clarify the concept of the probable (εἰκός): If most
B’s are, at most times, A, then it is likely that ‘the B’s’ are A. Even this, it seems to
me, does not deliver any kind of universal statement. It is telling that Aristotle
explains the concept of probability with reference to non-quantified statements of
the form ‘the B’s are A’. One can indeed assume that such statements are treated in
arguments like universal statements. Aristotle himself seems to confirm this when
he says that the probable is related to that with regard to which it is probable as the
universal is related to the particular (1357a36). Since, however, the quantitative
expressions ‘for the most part’ and ‘most’ are introduced as an explication of
‘probable’ and not vice-versa, we learn from this claim only that a probable

¹⁴ cf. Becker op.cit. 79–81; M.Mignucci, ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ et nécessaire dans la conception
Aristotélicienne de la science, in: E. Berti (ed.), Aristotle on Science: The ‘Posterior Analytics’, Padua
1981, 185ff.
¹⁵ On this point, cf. Becker, op.cit. 80; Barnes, Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, translated with notes,
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975, 229, Mignucci , op.cit.187–90, 196.
¹⁶ Mignucci, who has developed a formal model for these temporal expressions of Ω, does say that
such statements can include universal quantifiers but gives no examples. In passing, he indicates
himself that his model perhaps provides an analysis of the Aristotelian term εἰκός (‘probably’) rather
than φύσει. For natural science it is, of course, φύσει which is the central expression.
    27

universal statement must, strictly speaking, have the (non-syllogistic) form ‘most
B’s are at most times A’. For this reason, also, as Aristotle says, one cannot refute
such a probability premise simply by pointing to particular exceptions, but only by
attempting to show that either most B’s are not A, or that at most times some B’s
are not A, or both (i.e. that most B’s are at most times not A, 1402b35–1403a1). If,
therefore, one wished to introduce Ω as a temporal modal operator, one would once
again only obtain particular premises, which would not be sufficient for science.
The only thing that can be said about all B’s in these cases seems in fact to be
that they are possibly A—even if this does not, strictly speaking, follow, since it is,
of course, possible that most B’s are A’s at most times while some are necessarily
not A. Aristotle’s apparent failure to take this case into account may, once again,
be connected with the fact that he is assuming that the B’s are A by nature. If
something that is meant to be A by nature is in fact not A, then one might indeed
assume that it at least could be A, thus that it is not necessarily not-A.
Aristotle’s usage of the expression ‘by nature’ still needs to be considered. The
first thing to observe is that Φ does not mean the same as Ω, although Aristotle’s
frequent juxtaposition of the two expressions can give this impression. This may
be seen, first, in the fact that Aristotle’s own conception of those things that occur
by nature also includes some things that happen by necessity and always in the
same way (cf. Phys. Β 8.198b36, GC 333b5; EE Θ 2.1247a32–35; Rhet. Α
10.1369a34–b2). Second, it is not sufficient, and perhaps not even necessary,
that something occur in most cases for it to be the case by nature. From the fact
that most people are bad, for example, it does not follow that they are naturally
bad; and one could also claim without any obvious contradiction that people are
naturally good, even though most of them are bad. This, in any case, was the view
of the Stoics, although perhaps not Aristotle’s.¹⁷ Since, however, disruptions of the
normal course of events are rather uncommon in nature—or at least, Aristotle
takes them to be—one may assume that what occurs for the most part and in most
cases is in accordance with nature. This, and no more, is what Aristotle is claiming
when he says, for example, ‘in all cases where it is not impossible for things to be
otherwise than they generally are but where they may so happen, still what is the
general rule is what is according to nature’ (GA Δ 8.777a18–20). One thus need
not assume that Aristotle equates the concept of what occurs by nature with the
concept of what is the case for the most part, or that he wished to define the former
by the latter. What he says can also be understood as an argument: Since that which
happens by nature does not happen always, but rather only for the most part, that
which is in accordance with nature belongs to the realm of the contingent.
The expression ‘by nature’ seems better suited to be formulated in syllogistic
premises than ‘for the most part’, since it can straightforwardly occur in universal

¹⁷ For the example, see Top B 6,112b11–12; for Aristotle’s own view on this point see EN II 1,
1103a18–26.
28    

statements, as one can see by looking at the famous opening sentence of the
Metaphysics—‘all humans by nature desire to know’. One could thus try to
construe Φ as a modal operator, which is what Aristotle himself suggests when
he contrasts what occurs ‘for the most part and by nature’ with what is necessary.
But does this new operator fit into the system of Aristotelian modalities? That
universal Φ-statements are necessary seems ruled out by the fact that they hold
only for the most part. They must also be weaker than assertoric universals, since
AaB does not follow from Φ(AaB), but at most only AiB does. In the modal
syllogistic, Aristotle seems, however, to use ‘necessarily’ as a primitive expression
in order to define the concept of the possible.¹⁸ One can certainly assume that
what occurs by nature is not impossible; but if one tries to define Φ using
‘necessary’, then Aristotle’s conception of the contingent does seem to suggest
itself: neither necessary nor impossible. The alternative, to introduce Φ as a new,
undefined modal operator, is something that Aristotle probably would not have
considered. It also would have proven to be a dead end if one intended to try to
combine premises of different modalities with one another, as Aristotle does in the
modal syllogistic.
Now, An.Pr. A 13 itself seems to show that Aristotle was not entirely satisfied
with this solution, since he indicates that there is indeed a type of necessity in the
realm of natural processes, albeit not a ‘continuous’ one. He speaks without
hesitation about necessity in nature in his natural scientific works, but it evidently
disturbs him that this necessity arises precisely where things behave mostly, but
not always, in the same way. Needless to say, one would expect that necessary
states of affairs, if they exist, are to be described in necessity statements. It may
thus be worth pursuing the question that Aristotle does not: Could Φ-statements
perhaps still be represented as N-statements?
One can perhaps ascertain what Aristotle means when he says that this
necessity is interrupted or has gaps on the basis of the examples he gives in An.
Pr. A 13 (examples which he does not, however, treat in any detail). That (all) men
go grey or grow up or get old is not necessary, since some die as children, or in any
case before they have a chance to develop grey hair. On the other hand, one might
think that men do necessarily grow up, and later show signs of aging if they live to
be sufficiently old. The fact that they get grey hair is, however, not necessary—they
might instead become bald—but it is nevertheless the case for the most part. As
one can see from the description ‘either by necessity or for the most part’, Aristotle
is introducing two different kinds of example, both of which are, however, cases of
interrupted necessity.
In the examples of growing and aging, the necessity arises because a condition is
satisfied, namely the condition that men live long enough. With his third example,

¹⁸ I will assume that ‘impossible’ is understood to be equivalent to ‘necessarily not’, as Aristotle

frequently does. Cf., for example, Met. Δ 12.1019b23–24.
    29

Aristotle seems to take into account a further caveat in view of the fact that some
people do not develop grey hair even if they live to be old. In this case one could
perhaps say that there is at least the necessity that men will either go grey or go
bald. That the necessity has gaps can be explained, seemingly, by the fact that it
does not extend to all specimens of the human species—some people do not grow
old because they die too young. And the gaps arise because certain conditions
must be satisfied that are not satisfied in all cases. This suggests that the statements
in which these gappy necessities are described should be formulated as condition-
als: For example, ‘all humans get old if they live long enough’, or, in symbols, (x)
(Hx > (Bx > Ax)). The appearance of a certain condition in Aristotle’s examples
might, at first, prompt the thought that one could produce a ‘continuous’ necessity
simply through a qualification of the subject term: All older men get grey hair or
show other signs of old age. That, however, does not give us any generally
applicable formula for the gappy necessities of natural processes, since the
appearance of natural alterations or the actualization of natural capacities, like
sightedness, are not always connected with determinately specifiable conditions
like being of a certain age. While humans are sighted by nature, some are blind
from birth. Aristotle’s usage in a different place does, however, offer a more
general formulation of what might be meant with ‘by nature’ (Phys. B 8.199b26,
cf. 199a10, b18; Θ 4.255b7, 10–12, 19–21): what is the case by nature always
happens in the same way ‘if nothing prevents it’ (ἂν μή τι ἐμποδίσῃ). If we use S as a
symbolic abbreviation for the antecedent of a conditional, then universal state-
ments in which the expression ‘by nature’ occurs can be formally represented as
S > AaB (if nothing prevents it, then all B’s are A). One might well supply a
statement of this form with a necessity operator, since it evidently holds in all
cases. The gappy necessity of natural processes can thus, it seems, be explained as
the constant necessity of certain conditional statements.
As is well known, however, conditional statements are not syllogistic premises,
and Aristotle also does not recognize them as statements of any other logical form.
In the syllogistic he assumes that all statements that occur in any logically valid
proof have the standard form AxB (with or without a modal operator) or can be
put in this form. With regard to universal premises of natural scientific arguments,
he could therefore only ask about the status of statements of the form (X)AaB, and
these are, even when the corresponding implicative statement holds, still neither
necessary nor impossible, and thus to all appearances contingent. In order to
achieve syllogistic form, one could, however, use the expression N(S> . . . ) as a
definition of a new modal operator Φ, since S is presumably considered to be a
constant. In this way Φ would be connected with the necessity operator.¹⁹ This
sort of introduction of Φ again, however, presupposes that conditional expressions

¹⁹ Jonathan Barnes made me aware of this possibility.

30    

are available, and in doing so goes beyond the formal resources of the Aristotelian
syllogistic. If one assumes the formal representation of Φ-statements that I have
suggested, then it is easy to show that Aristotle’s optimism regarding logical
derivation with these sorts of premises was indeed justified. A ‘syllogism’ of the
mood Barbara would, for instance, have the form N(S>AaB), N(S>BaC) N
(S>AaC). It is easy to show that this is a valid deductive schema using the
resources of modal propositional logic: From N(p>q), N(p>s), and N(q&s>r)
(Barbara), N(p>r) follows.²⁰ Since Φ-statements can now be conceived of as
necessity statements of a particular form, the difficulty with which we began
disappears. According to Aristotle’s theory of science there is, on the one hand,
scientific knowledge only of necessary states of affairs; on the other hand, there are
meant to be sciences whose initial premises are contingency premises. The
contradiction arises because Aristotle only considers statements of the form
AxB with one of the modal operators N, M, or Q as candidates for premises of
natural science. If AaB holds only with the qualification ‘by nature’, then, it seems,
the corresponding premises of natural sciences can only be understood as con-
tingency premises. The Φ-premises of natural sciences should, however, as closer
analysis shows, be represented not as contingent universal statements but rather as
necessity statements of the implicative form N(S>AaB). Aristotle would then not
have had to say that one could know that all sheep have four legs by nature, even
though this is a contingent fact; he could have said that all sheep normally have
four legs, and that one can know this because it is necessary. Whether a certain
sheep has four legs or whether all sheep have four legs remains, as Aristotle says,
contingent; but in the realm of contingent natural processes there can be science
because there is a sufficient number of normal cases. What is contingent in the
particular cases holds of normal cases necessarily.
The necessity that one refers to here—if one does want to follow Aristotle in
speaking about necessity—is evidently not a logical one. What Aristotle had in
mind when he spoke of necessity in nature must be inferred from his natural
scientific writings. If we leave aside the unproblematic case of unchanging astro-
nomical phenomena, there are two kinds of necessity to be distinguished. Both of
these, it seems to me, fall under the concept of necessity under normal circum-
stances as characterized above.
In his biological writings and in the Physics, Aristotle distinguishes between
‘hypothetical’ and ‘simple’ necessity.²¹ By ‘hypothetical’ necessity he understands

²⁰ If one omits the necessity operator, one can also justify syllogisms with one assertoric and one
Φ-premise, which Aristotle seems to defend in An.Pr. A 15. If, however, one represents Φ-premises as
statements of necessity, as seems to be Aristotle’s intention, then one requires a premise of necessity
rather than an assertoric premise—which corresponds, conversely, to Aristotle’s postulate that asser-
toric premises apply without temporal restriction.
²¹ Cf. Phys. B 9.199b34–35; PA I 1.642a34–36. The interpretation of this distinction is the subject of
much discussion; on this, see D.M. Balme, Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione
Animalium I, transl. with notes by D.M.B., Oxford 1972 ,76–84; U. Wolf, Möglichkeit und
    31

the necessity of certain means for a given end, in which case the means can be
characterized as necessary, not in themselves, but in view of this goal. For
example, in order for a house to come into being, there must necessarily be stones
and beams available. Likewise, it is hypothetically necessary that humans have
eyelids which protect their sensitive eyes from injury (PA II 13.657a25ff.). The
necessity arises from the fact that eyes fulfil a specific function, and not, for
example, that they consist of a certain material.
Aristotle speaks of ‘simple’ or ‘natural’ necessity, by contrast, in connection
with properties and types of behaviour that apply to certain materials like the
elements ‘according to their nature’, for example the downward movement of
stones (An.Po. B 11.95a2). This second type of necessity is subordinated to
hypothetical necessity in the case of the coming into being of organisms because
it can only be called upon to provide an explanation when a hypothetical necessity
already dictates that certain materials are present. Thus, one can say, for example,
that the front teeth of certain types of animals fall out owing to the constitution of
the jaw at certain times (GA V 8.789a8–b8); the fact that just this sort of material is
in this place must, however, be explained in turn on the basis of a hypothetical
necessity.
As this example shows, Aristotle uses the distinction between hypothetical and
‘simple’ or material necessity in order to prove the utility and indispensability of
teleological explanations in the natural sciences. This point will not interest us
further here. It seems to me that one can, however, show that both of the kinds of
natural necessity Aristotle describes presuppose the existence of normal condi-
tions. For hypothetical necessity this applies in the cases where something is
viewed not as the necessary condition for something coming into being or the
presence of a certain result, but rather as a necessary condition for something
functioning correctly. It is, for example, without a doubt unqualifiedly true that if
a person is to come into being or be present, flesh and bones must be present. One
can, however, not say without qualification that people necessarily have eyelids,
because as we all know there can—on account of developmental defects or
injury—be people without eyelids. The necessity is interrupted in these cases, as
Aristotle says; it seems, however, nevertheless reasonable to speak here of neces-
sity, since the gaps evidently arise from the interruption of a natural process that
can normally be taken for granted to an equal extent in all cases and that can be
explained as necessary for the complete achievement of a predetermined goal.

Notwendigkeit bei Aristoteles und heute, Munich 1979, 90-8; R. Sorabji, Necessity, Cause and Blame,
London 1980, ch. IX, 143–54; J. Cooper, Aristotle on Natural Teleology, in: M. Schofield/M.
C. Nussbaum (ed.), Language and Logos, Cambridge U.P. 1982,210 n. 8. My presentation relies on
the more recent study by Cooper, ‘Hypothetical Necessity’, in: A. Gotthelf (ed.), Aristotle on Nature and
Living Things, Mathesis Publications, Pittsburgh 1986, 151–167, in which he refines his earlier
argumentation.
32    

Sheep with three legs are indisputably still sheep; but they are missing something
which one may understandably view as necessary for healthy sheep.
Above all, the ‘simple’ or ‘natural’ necessity of the behaviour of elements seems
to be connected with normal conditions. Exceptions to naturally ‘necessary’
behaviour arise, for example, through the use of force: By their nature stones fall
to the ground and in this sense necessarily, but, with force, they may also be
moved upwards.²² Air necessarily expands when it warms, but one can prevent its
expansion with force if one encloses it in a sufficiently airtight vessel. In these
cases, too, it thus seems fitting to speak of necessity in light of normal conditions.
What Aristotle has to say about the necessity of natural processes thus seems to
me to confirm the proposed analysis of the type of statement in which something
is described as such and such ‘by nature’. Such a statement is a matter of necessity
with gaps; the gaps can, however, be represented by means of a conditional
statement without requiring us to treat universal statements about natural pro-
cesses as contingency statements. It thus becomes intelligible that natural pro-
cesses can rightly be described, on the one hand, as necessary, while on the other
hand, since they are liable to interruptions, they can be seen as contingent
processes in the individual case.
The section of the An.Pr. we began with concludes with the promise of a more
precise discussion that Aristotle presumably never wrote. This is one of many
places in the Analytics in which Aristotle, it seems, recognized that the framework
of the syllogistic was too narrow for the domain that it was apparently intended to
encompass—the realm of all formally valid arguments. A similarly unfulfilled
promise is to be found in chapter A 44, at the conclusion of his treatment of
syllogisms ‘from a hypothesis’, where Aristotle explicitly states that the arguments
he has just described cannot be put into syllogistic form (50b2–3). It is hardly
surprising that Aristotle was so impressed by his discovery of formal syllogistic—
truly a great discovery—that he expected more from it than it was capable of
delivering. But perhaps it speaks even more to the greatness of Aristotle that he
was not misled by syllogistic into giving up prior commitments for which he
thought he had good reasons. The thesis that there is scientific knowledge only of
necessary states of affairs is independent of Aristotle’s formal logic.²³ One should
thus—pace Barnes—also not count it among the formal shackles that the syllo-
gistic cast on a theory of science that was originally not geared towards any
particular formal logic (Barnes, op.cit. 1981, 58). The opposite in fact seems to
be the case: Aristotle did not renounce this thesis even though his modal syllogistic

²² ἀνάγκη—the same Greek word that is used for necessity. This is, however, a different sort of
necessity, as Aristotle notes (An.Po. B 11,94b37–95a2).
²³ For a defence of this thesis, see A. C. Lloyd, Necessity and Essence in the Posterior Analytics, in
E. Berti (ed.) Aristotle on Science: The ‘Posterior Analytics’. Padua 1981, 157–71 and Sorabji, op.cit.
ch. XIII, 209–22. I thank Jonathan Barnes, Wolfgang Carl, and Ulrich Nortmann for critical comments
on an earlier version of this chapter.
    33

seemed to force the conclusion that the premises of natural sciences must also
include contingency statements.
As I have attempted to show, the thesis that scientific statements are necessary
truths can in fact be rendered compatible with the thesis that there can be a science
of what occurs ‘for the most part and by nature’, but not always in the same way.
However, Aristotle’s formal theory seems to have led him to the conclusion that
the ultimate premises of some natural sciences can only be statements of
contingency.
We should not suppose that Aristotle never realized that his position was
contradictory. However, he evidently preferred to leave the problem open and
to think about it further rather than allowing his system to drive him to accept one
position or the other.
Taken together, Aristotle’s considerations regarding the necessity and contin-
gency of natural processes offer us a framework for explaining why there can be
science in the realm of the contingent: namely because the regular course of
certain processes makes it possible to distinguish normal cases from exceptions
or interruptions. Admittedly, though, what ought to count as normal in a given
domain is a difficult problem, and one that still occupies scientists today.
 3
Assertoric vs. Modal Syllogistic

This chapter argues that the inconsistencies in Aristotle’s modal syllogistic

are probably due to the fact that he did not realize that the switch from the
predication relations of the Topics to the quantitative term relations in
the Analytics would lead to difficulties for the interpretation of his premises.
The conversion rules regularly lead to what he calls (at An.Po. I 22.83a1–18)
predication per accidens (as in ‘the white is a log’) and rules out for scientific
proofs. Such cases do not affect the validity of assertoric syllogistic, but they
do lead to unacceptable results in the case of de re—modalities. Aristotle
notices such problems in a few places, but the solutions he offers hold only for
the particular cases.

Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic was a spectacular success; by comparison, his

modal syllogistic was a failure. How could this happen?
Just in case someone would want to object to the second claim, let me briefly
remind you of the reason why I think it should be uncontroversial: Aristotle’s
modal syllogistic is incoherent. Beginning with Alexander of Aphrodisias,¹ who
was probably not the first to say this, we find commentators pointing out that if
Aristotle had consistently applied his own methods of proof and refutation, his
results would have been different—so different, indeed, that one may reasonably
doubt whether he would have preferred to accept them or whether he would
rather have changed his basic assumptions. There is, therefore, no hope in
finding a consistent formal model to represent Aristotle’s modal syllogistic,
and attempts to construct versions that capture as many as possible of the
moods he accepts seem pointless. The important question ought to be what
went wrong, and why.
It appears from the ancient commentaries, and indeed from Aristotle’s text
itself (A.Pr. I 15.34b5–18; I 17.37a9–31), that modal syllogistic ran into troubles
from the very beginning. The first critics were Aristotle’s pupils and colleagues

¹ In Aristotelis Analyticorum Priorum Librum I Commentarium, ed. M. Wallies, Berlin 1883,

144.32–145.4; 207.28–36; 213.11–27; 216.24–26. Among modern studies see, for example, J. Hintikka
‘An Aristotelian Dilemma’, Ajatus 22(1959), 87–92; J. van Rijen, ‘Aspects of Aristotle’s Logic of
Modalities’ (Synthese Historical Library 39), Dordrecht: Reidel 1989, 194–9.

From Aristotle to Cicero: Essays on Ancient Philosophy. Gisela Striker, Oxford University Press. © Gisela Striker 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868385.003.0003
  .   35

Theophrastus and Eudemus.² Theophrastus, it seems, was less interested in

understanding Aristotle’s reasons for accepting certain theses than in trying to
construct a system that would avoid some obvious difficulties. As a result, he
rejected Aristotle’s special conversion rules for possibility-premises, and intro-
duced a sweeping rule to determine the modality of conclusions: the conclusion
will never be stronger than the weakest premise.³ These changes produced a
simpler and superficially less paradoxical system. The first move substitutes the
simpler concept of possibility proper (equivalent to ‘not impossible’ or ‘not
necessarily not’) for Aristotle’s narrower concept of contingency (neither neces-
sary nor impossible). This may not have been a bad idea from a systematic
perspective but, of course, it does not help us in understanding Aristotle. The
notorious peiorem rule, on the other hand, though intuitively appealing and
certainly easy to apply, is really a non-logical rule, similar to the kind of thing
one can find, for example, in Philoponus⁴ (and many later authors): ‘a syllogism
must not have two negative or two particular premises’, and so on. Theophrastus
seems to have argued for his rule by appealing to the analogy with assertoric
syllogistic: if one ranks premises as stronger and weaker in the order a (universal
affirmative), e (universal negative), i (particular affirmative), o (particular nega-
tive), then in assertoric syllogisms the conclusion will ‘always follow the weaker
premise’ (Al.Aphr. in An.Pr. I 124,8–17). This happens to be a correct observation,
but it is not a rule of deduction. According to Bochenski (La logique . . . 101)
Theophrastus’s peiorem rule is not even correct for his own system.
Theophrastus’s alternative, then, does not offer a clue to our question.
The medieval logicians apparently used the de dicto/de re distinction to defend
Aristotle’s decision, in An.Pr. I, to accept first-figure moods with necessary major
and assertoric minor premise and necessary conclusion as valid while rejecting a
necessary conclusion in cases of an assertoric major premise combined with a
necessary minor.⁵ But they were primarily interested in constructing their own
modal logics, and not in offering diagnoses as to why Aristotle might have
proceeded the way he did. For sophisticated attempts to deal with the problems
of Aristotle’s modal syllogistic we have to look at the work of twentieth-century
scholars whose interest in the question was aroused by the pioneering studies of
Lukasiewicz. I will not try to discuss the verdict of Lukasiewicz himself, who
thought that Aristotle’s modal logic was a hopeless muddle. The first plausible
attempt to explain what Aristotle did came from A. Becker⁶ who worked with

² See Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis, An.Pr. 1284.8–125.2; 173.33–174.3; 220.9–16, and

234.4–14.
³ For Theophrastus’ system, see I.M. Bochenski, La logique de Théophraste, Fribourg (Suisse) 1947, ch. V.
⁴ In Aristotelis Analytica Priora Commentaria, ed. M. Wallies, Berlin 1905, 70.1–71.17.
⁵ See W. Kneale, ‘Modality De Dicto and De Re’; in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science,
ed. E. Nagel, P. Suppes, and A. Tarski, Stanford, CA 1962, 622–33.
⁶ Die Aristotelische Theorie der Möglichkeitsschlüsse, Berlin 1933.
36    

Heinrich Scholz, not incidentally a friend of Lukasiewicz. One of Becker’s most

important findings was that Aristotle’s rules for the term-conversion of necessary
premises are all right if the modal operator is assumed to range over the entire
proposition, whereas they break down if it is construed as part of the predicate. On
the other hand, Aristotle’s choice of valid and invalid moods in the first figure with
mixed necessary and assertoric premises can be justified if the modal operator is
construed as part of the predicate, but not if it ranges over the entire proposition
(Becker, op. cit. 41–3). In other words, and using the medieval labels, the conver-
sion rules require a de dicto reading, while the ‘mixed’ syllogisms of chapter I 9
must be construed de re. No wonder, then, that the resulting system is incoherent.
Becker’s diagnosis still seems to me to be very plausible, at least as a first step, but
it does not answer all the questions that one might legitimately ask. First of all,
the de dicto/de re distinction is not Aristotle’s, and it might be more desirable to find
some truly Aristotelian ambiguity at the root of the problem, if ambiguity there
is. Second, a diagnosis in terms of possible formal renderings of Aristotle’s
premises obviously will not tell us why Aristotle might have been inclined to
adopt one or the other interpretation of modal premises. Now, modal syllogistic
was presumably developed to serve as a deductive theory for the sciences as
described in the An.Po.⁷ Hence it seems plausible to think that Aristotle’s views
on science might offer some illumination about his understanding of modal
syllogistic. Furthermore, the Analytics is, of course, not the only treatise in which
Aristotle deals with necessity and possibility, so it should also be worthwhile to look
at other passages—for example, in the Metaphysics, the Physics, the De Caelo—to
see whether they throw some light on his theory of modal propositions. In this way
one might hope to discover what Aristotle intended to do—what kinds of argu-
ments he might have had in mind when talking about syllogisms with necessary or
contingent premises.

⁷ Several people—John Corcoran, Ulrich Nortmann, Robin Smith—have suggested that modal logic
should not be seen as the official logic for demonstrative science because the An.Po., as a matter of fact,
seems to use assertoric syllogistic. Scientific demonstrations must indeed have premises that state
necessary truths, but it does not follow that those premises must be explicitly modal, that is, contain
modal operators. This is an attractive proposal with regard to the An.Po., given the scarcity of
references in its text to modal syllogistic, and it would also seem to be corroborated by a passage in
Rhet. II 25,1402b13ff., where Aristotle clearly envisages premises that hold only ‘for the most part’, but
that are stated as universal propositions. However, it seems clear from the structure of An.Pr. that
modal syllogistic was an afterthought, and so we cannot be sure that it was already available when
Aristotle wrote the bulk of the An.Po. Aristotle’s remarks, at An.Pr. I 13,32b18–22 (on the possibility of
demonstration for things that are ‘by nature and for the most part’) and at An.Po. I 6,75a1–10 (on
necessary conclusions from necessary premises), seem to me to indicate, first, that it is not safe to
ascribe to him the distinction between non-modal propositions stating necessary or contingent facts
and explicitly modalized propositions; and second, that he probably intended his modal syllogistic to
cover scientific argument, even though he may have worked it out only after (most of) the An.Po. was
already written. Given that pure necessity syllogistic is supposed to work exactly like assertoric (An.Pr.
I 8), he would not have needed to revise much in his theory of scientific demonstration.
  .   37

As it happens, three studies of this sort were published in 1989–90, by van

Rijen, Patterson, and Nortmann.⁸ Two of these deal only with necessity; the third
(Nortmann) also discusses syllogisms with contingent premises. It is perhaps
reassuring to see that they seem to agree in several ways, though their conclusions
are different. All three acknowledge the fundamental incoherence of Aristotle’s
system as it stands. What they set out to do is to discover what kind of
system Aristotle should have offered, given what he says elsewhere, notably
in An.Po. I 1–4, about the premises of scientific demonstrations. On the basis of
An.Po. I 4–6, van Rijen proposes an extremely restrictive interpretation for
scientific premises, too complicated to set out here in detail. Roughly speaking,
the idea is that such premises will be true only if they fulfil the conditions laid out
in the An.Po. to the effect that the predicate must belong to the subject per se (καθ’
αὑτό). By these standards, a proposition like ‘all ravens are necessarily birds’ will
qualify, but ‘some black things are necessarily birds’ will not be acceptable—
ravens are birds qua ravens, not qua black. Given these restrictions, however,
van Rijen can claim to have shown that the ‘inference base’ of Aristotle’s system of
necessary and assertoric premises is sound (p. 210f.). That is to say, both the rules
of term-conversion and the moods accepted as perfect will come out as correct in
the same system. On the other hand, Aristotle himself does not observe the
strictures imposed in An.Po. when he offers terms for counterexamples, and so
his results do not cohere with his initial assumptions.
Patterson’s interpretation is less restrictive. He points out that there is good
Aristotelian evidence for accepting both types of necessity propositions illustrated
above. We might call the first sort (‘all ravens are necessarily birds’) strict necessity
propositions—they seem to hold both de re and de dicto—and the second pure de
re propositions.⁹ If some black things are necessarily birds, this is not because
being black has anything to do with being a bird, but because some things that can
be correctly described as black are such as to be essentially birds. Patterson’s ‘strict’
necessity is similar to the only sort of necessity admitted by van Rijen, and both
agree that term-conversion of necessary premises will work if this interpretation is

⁸ For van Rijen, see fn. 1 above. The others are R. Patterson, ‘The case of the two Barbaras’, Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy 7, 1989, 1–40; U. Nortmann, ‘Über die Stärke der aristotelischen Modallogik’,
Erkenntnis 32, 1990, 61–82. Nortmann is publishing preliminary results of a more extended study.
⁹ Patterson claims that it is misleading to apply the de re/de dicto distinction to Aristotelian
propositions because Aristotle himself takes the modality to go with the copula—he says several
times that ‘necessarily belonging’ or ‘possibly belonging’ function in the same way as ‘belonging’ or
‘being’ in assertoric propositions. Apart from the fact that the very same passages were cited earlier by
the Kneales (W. Kneale, op. cit above, n. 5; M. Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford 1962, 83) as
conclusive evidence of a de dicto reading, the objection that a de re reading treats the modality as part of
the predicate term, which Aristotle manifestly does not do, seems to me to be a misunderstanding. The
predicate-expression in a proposition of the form ‘B is A’, on a modern understanding of translation
into symbolic notation, is ‘ . . . is A’, not just ‘A’, and so to say that the modal operator is treated as part
of the predicate is not to say that it is part of the predicate term. Hence, I take it that Patterson’s ‘weak’
necessity can be understood as a kind of de re necessity; and that the passages about the alleged
parallelism between the copula and modal ‘belonging’ are in themselves inconclusive.
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