This update to the award-winning first edition analyzes the pros and cons of different media and focuses on general guidelines and basic principles, making the ideas in this guide transferable to future technologies.

"De interpretatione" from Aristoteles. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher born in Greece.

vol. I. Logic: Categoriae. De interpretatione. Analytica priora. Analytica posteriora.--vol. II. Natural philosophy: Physica. De caelo. De generatione et corruptione.--vol. III. Psychology: De anima. Parva Naturalia.--vol. IV. Metaphysics: Metaphysica.--vol. V. Ethics: Ethica Nicomachea.--vol. VI. Politics and poetics: Politica. De poetica.

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

Categorie -- De interpretatione -- Analitici primi -- Analitici secondi -- Topici -- Confutazioni sofistiche.

Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system, basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis.By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it (...) forms an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, the system of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's most famous texts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this paper I show that, contrary to the prevalent view, in his De Interpretatione chapter 8, Aristotle is concerned with a kind of ambiguity, i.e. with homonymy; more precisely, with homonymy of linguistic expressions as it may occur in dialectical argument. The paper has two parts. In the first part, I argue that in the Sophistici Elenchi 175b39-176a5 Aristotle indubitably deals with homonymy in dialectical argument; that De Interpretatione 8 is a parallel to Sophistici Elenchi 175b39-176a5; (...) that De Interpretatione 8 is concerned with dialectical argument; that, hence, De Interpretatione 8, too, deals with homonymy in dialectical argument. In the second part I discuss objections that have been put forward against the view that De Interpretatione 8 is about homonymy and demonstrate that they do not succeed. (shrink)

The article investigates the treatment of modality in chapters 12 and 13 of De Interpretatione and gives a new interpretation of the puzzling table of modals to be found at the beginning of chapter 13, as well as dealing with some of Aristotle’s puzzles. This is achieved by extending Aristotle’s distinction between two senses of possibility, which (following Ackrill) I call ‘one-sided’ and ‘two-sided’, to the two notions of necessity and impossibility. The conclusion is reached that, while the two (...) notions of necessity and impossibility are logically incompatible when both are taken as one-sided, in their two-sided senses they are in fact equivalent. (shrink)

In De Interpretatione 6-9, Aristotle considers three logical principles: the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the rule of contradictory pairs (according to which of any contradictory pair of statements, exactly one is true and the other false). Surprisingly, Aristotle accepts none of these without qualification. I offer a coherent interpretation of these chapters as a whole, while focusing special attention on two sorts of statements that are of particular interest to Aristotle: universal statements not made (...) universally and future particular statements. With respect to the former, I argue that Aristotle takes them to be indeterminate and so to violate the rule of contradictory pairs. With respect to the latter, the subject of the much discussed ninth chapter, I argue that the rule of contradictory pairs, and not the principle of bivalence, is the focus of Aristotle's refutation. Nevertheless, Aristotle rejects bivalence for future particular statements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic by C. W. A. WhitakerEugene GarverC. W. A. Whitaker, Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. x + 235. Cloth, $60.00.Traditionally, the De Interpretatione is placed in the Organon between the Categories and the Prior Analytics. Where the Categories is about single terms and the Analytics about inferences, the De Interpretatione is about propositions. (...) That traditional view is presupposed by most contemporary studies of the work, which “concentrate on a small number of passages, which have been treated as isolated oases of philosophical interest in an otherwise barren work,” highlights which include “Aristotle’s semantic theory of philosophy of language” in the first chapter, the first four “linguistic chapters,” and chapter 9 on the Sea Battle (1). I suppose that the square of opposition could be added to Whitaker’s list.Whitaker, in this republication of a doctoral dissertation, wants to challenge both the traditional view and the contemporary concentration by instead studying the work as a coherent whole, whose subject, it turns out, is not propositions after all but “contradictory pairs, which are central to the working of dialectic” (2). The book then proceeds through the De Interpretatione, chapter by chapter. If he succeeds, the De Interpretatione will henceforth be read as preparation for the Topics, rather than for the Analytics. There are also three appendices examining the use of such contradictory pairs in Metaphysics IV, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics.Thus, the first five chapters of the De Interpretatione explain the nature of assertions, name and verb, and “before that, how language is related to thought and to the real world, and how it is that utterances can make claims about things which are true or false” (8). Where names, verbs, and propositions are part of our ordinary understanding of language, contradictory pairs are not, but are a philosophical understanding of a linguistic structure that has a specifically philosophical, dialectical, purpose. The rest of the De Interpretatione, from chapter 6 on, is the examination of contradiction. Chapters 7–9 classify contradictory pairs by different criteria. Each of these chapters isolates an exception to “the rule that, in every contradictory pair, one member is true and the other false” (79). Chapter 7 looks at the first exception to the rule, “non-universal statements about universals” (91). Whitaker’s project looks good here, since he then shows the dialectical uses of such propositions, and denies their value for the deductive logic of the Analytics. Similarly, in Chapter 8 Aristotle looks at “apparently simple assertions... which are not single” (105), which also have important uses in dialectic. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the third exception to the rule, future singular assertions. One payoff of this book is to place the sea battle discussion in its Aristotelian context. [End Page 459] Whitaker says that most discussions of the sea battle assume that what is at stake is what he calls the “Principle of Bivalence” in which every assertion is either true or false. He instead insists that it is contradictory pairs, not single assertions, that are being tested by future contingents. He thus concludes: “Dialectic is a universal discipline, and its questioning can cover any subject where a question can be posed which has a right and a wrong answer. Chapters 7 to 9... demonstrate that there are limits to the universality of dialectic” (128).Whitaker follows the De Interpretatione chapter by chapter in the remainder of the book. He shows how the later chapters assist the dialectician in “sorting assertions into contradictory pairs” (181). And just as De Interpretatione begins with a consideration of the relation of language, thought, and the world, so it ends by showing the connection between contradictory propositions and opposed beliefs.Whitaker rarely strays from the De Interpretatione to show how our understanding of dialectic is improved by attention to this prerequisite. When he does, for example in a very short discussion of the relation of problems and propositions in the Topics, the results are illuminating. I would have liked more. This book should be useful to the growing numbers of scholars interested in Aristotle’s art of dialectic... (shrink)

This new edition of Aristotle s De interpretatione provides an improved text compared to the 1949 Oxford edition, based upon an evaluation of the seven earliest surviving medieval manuscripts as well as many translations and commentaries from late antiquity. A text-critical apparatus provides information about the different readings.".

From its title, which since antiquity has occasioned interpretations of varying ingenuity and implausibility and which the book under review is probably right to judge both inauthentic and inappropriate, to its final chapter, thought to be post-Aristotelian or an exercise by Porphyry and the Greek commentators who followed him, On Interpretation has long been considered one of Aristotle’s most puzzling works. Brief as it is, this treatise was divided into four main parts by Ammonius, dealing with the principles of the (...) assertoric sentence, the proposition consisting of subject and predicate terms only, the proposition which contains an “added predicate”, and modal propositions. Modern commentators tend to find in the work important, but isolated, discussions of general semantic theory, the elements of grammar, and modality and fatalism, but not much else of interest. (shrink)

Aristotle Categoriae et Liber de Interpretatione.

Regarding the famous Sea Battle Argument, which Aristotle presents in De Interpretatione 9, there has never been a general agreement not only about its correctness but also, and mainly, about what the argument really is. According to the most natural reading of the chapter, the argument appeals to a temporal concept of truth and concludes that not every statement is always either true or false. However, many of Aristotle’s followers and commentators have not adopted this reading. I believe that (...) it has faced so much resistance for reasons of hermeneutic charity: denying the law of universal bivalence seems to be overly disruptive to logical orthodoxy – the kind of logical orthodoxy represented by what we now call classical propositional logic, much of which Aristotle clearly supports in many texts. I intend to show that the logical-semantic theses that the traditional reading finds in De Interpretatione 9 are much more conservative than they may seem to be at first glance. First, I will show that they complement, and do not contradict in any way, the orthodox definitions of the concepts of truth and statement that Aristotle advances in other texts. Second, by resorting in an anachronistic vein to concepts and methods peculiar to contemporary logic, I will show that a trivalent modal semantics conforming to those theses can be built for a standard formal language of the classical propositional calculus. It is remarkable that reasonable concepts of logical truth and logical consequence that may be defined on the basis of this trivalent modal semantics are coextensive with their orthodox counterparts, the concepts of tautology and tautological consequence of classical bivalent and extensional semantics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the communicational aspects of Aristotle’s theory of signification as laid out in the initial chapters of the De Interpretatione (Int.).1 We begin by outlining the reception and main interpretations of the chapters under discussion, rather siding with the linguistic strand. We then argue that the first four chapters present an account of verbal communication, in which words signify things via thoughts. We show how Aristotle determines voice as a conventional and hence accidental medium of (...) signification: words as ‘spoken sounds’ are tokens of thoughts, which in turn are signs or natural likenesses of things. We argue that, in this way, linguistic expressions may both signify thoughts and refer to things. This double account of signification also explains the variety of ontological, logical and psychological interpretations of the initial chapters of Int. (shrink)

In his detailed and well-argued study of the De interpretatione, Whitaker shows that the treatise is a coherent whole and is closely linked to the Topics and the Sophistici Elenchi, rather than to the Categories and the Prior Analytics as tradition has it. Convinced of the dialectical character of the book he rejects the title as spurious. It should be περὶ ἀντιφάσεως. In the first chapter Whitaker defends the reading πρώτων in 16a8 and explains that falsehood is stating as (...) one things which are in reality separated from each other, or as separate things which are one. Next he deals with the analysis of nouns and verbs. Departing from Alexander, he is right in holding that only man has speech. Animals can show something but do not signify it. The difficult sentence “being by itself is nothing” is understood as follows: being represents the combination of subject and predicate in an assertion. By itself it is nothing, but when used as a copula it gets an additional signification. However, I do not think that this understanding of προσημαίνειν is correct. In the interpretation of Whitaker, the text should simply say “it gets a meaning” without the “additional.” On this point one may usefully compare the commentary by St. Thomas Aquinas, In I Perihermeneias, lesson 5, which reviews the various options. The verb “to be” alone does not signify that something is, but it denotes pure actuality. (shrink)

An English translation of John Duns Scotus's The Questions on Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" including an extensive commentary on some of Scotus's more difficult ideas.

Boethius represents one of the most important milestones in Christian reflection about fate and providence, especially considering that he takes into account Proclus’ contributions to these questions. For this reason, The Consolation of philosophy is considered a crucial work for the development of this topic. However, Boethius also exposes his ideas in his commentary on the book that constitutes one of the oldest and most relevant texts on the problem of future contingents, namely Aristotle’s De interpretatione. Although St. Thomas (...) refers to Boethius many times in his systematic works and even devotes two commentaries to two of his theological opuscules, it is of special interest that both authors composed a commentary on the abovementioned work by Aristotle. The commentary of Saint Thomas does not interpret the whole book, but it does study the pages about future contingents in dialogue with Boethius. We will study such texts in our presentation. They constitute one of the greatest contributions of Aquinas to the problem of necessity and contingency and therefore to the vexata quaestio of divine intervention in the world and particularly in human free will. Not only Augustin but also Aristotle (read by Boethius) and Nemesius of Emesa will be decisive in Aquinas’ perception of this matter. (shrink)

Both the title of this treatise and its traditional placement as the second of Aristotle's logical writings are highly misleading. What, on the one hand, De Interpretatione deals with is not, as its title suggests, a theory of interpretation, but rather a theory of statement-making sentences of different sorts and the logical relations that obtain between them; and what, on the other hand, this theory aims at is not, as suggested by the place which De Interpretatione traditionally occupies (...) in the Organon between the Categories and the Prior Analytics, providing preliminaries to the study of syllogistic by analyzing statement-making sentences as possible parts of syllogisms, but rather underpinning the study of dialectical debates by examining such sentences as possible members of contradictory pairs. Among other things, De Interpretatione deals with symbols or signs, truth, bivalence, determinism, modal logic, and modal statements. (shrink)

Modern logicians have complained that Aristotelian logic lacks a distinction between predication and assertion, and that predication, according to the Aristotelians, implies assertion. The present paper addresses the question of whether this criticism can be levelled against Aristotle’s logic. Based on a careful study of the De interpretatione, the paper shows that even if Aristotle defines what he calls simple assertion in terms of predication, he does not confound predication and assertion. That is because, first, he does not understand (...) compound assertion in terms of predication, and secondly, he acknowledges non-assertive predicative thoughts that are truth-evaluable. Therefore, the implications of Aristotle’s ‘predication theory of assertion’ are not as devastating as the critics believe. (shrink)

Abstract. This study analyses and assesses the notion of « signification » deployed in « De int. » 1 and its role in the whole of « De int. » Four main conclusions are reached: (i) The semantic observations of « De int. » 1 provide linguistic elements and linguistic background to explain contrary pairs, contradictory pairs, statement-making-sentences, and truth and falsehood. (ii) In « De int. » 1, Aristotle restricts his semantic interests to elements and relations necessary for explaining (...) contrary and contradictory pairs of assertions, and he does this at the expense of other linguistic and semantic issues that may be important for us, such as communication and linguistic content. As a consequence, Aristotle’s linguistic terminology in « De int. » 1, and the « De int. » in general, does not explicitly distinguish different senses of « signification » and obscures some aspects of the linguistic distinctions between statement-making-sentences, non-statement-making-sentences, and compound nouns. (iii) « De int. » 1 presupposes a distinction between simple vocalized-sounds and complex vocalized-sounds which implies a very rough notion of compositionality, according to which complex vocalized-sounds consist of simple vocalized-sounds. (iv) « De int. » 1 does not contain a theory of what we call « meaning », for its main concern is neither how we manage to understand or be motivated by expressions, nor what we request when we fail to understand or be motivated by an expression. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to figure out whether Aristotle's response to the argument for fatalism in De Interpretatione 9 is a success. By "response" it is meant not simply the reasons Aristotle offers to highlight why fatalism does not accord with how we conduct our lives, but also the solution he devises to block the argument for fatalism. This paper finds that a) Aristotle's argument for fatalism is essentially bivalence plus that the truth of a proposition implies (...) necessity, b) that Aristotle's solution is to restrict bivalence, c) that this solution is coherent, and d) that while this solution does not rule out the possibility of fatalism, it does succeed in blocking the argument for fatalism offered within chapter 9. El objetivo de este trabajo es esclarecer si la respuesta de Aristóteles al argumento a favor del fatalismo en De Interpretatione 9 resulta exitosa. Por "respuesta" se entienden no solo las razones que da Aristóteles para destacar porqué el fatalismo no concuerda con la manera en que llevamos nuestras vidas, sino también la solución que ofrece para bloquear el argumento a favor del fatalismo. El artículo plantea a) que el argumento de Aristóteles respecto del fatalismo consiste esencialmente en la bivalencia más el hecho de que la verdad de una proposición implica necesidad; b) que la solución de Aristóteles es restringir la bivalencia; c) que esta solución es coherente, y d) que si bien esta solución no elimina la posibilidad del fatalismo, sí logra bloquear el argumento a favor del fatalismo ofrecido en el capítulo 9. O objetivo deste trabalho é esclarecer se a resposta de Aristóteles ao argumento a favor do fatalismo em De Interpretatione 9 é bem-sucedida. Por "resposta" se entendem não somente as razões que Aristóteles dá para destacar por que o fatalismo não está de acordo com a maneira em que levamos nossas vidas, mas também a solução que oferece para bloquear o argumento a favor do fatalismo. Este artigo propõe que: a) o argumento de Aristóteles a respeito do fatalismo consiste essencialmente na bivalência mais o fato de que a verdade de uma proposição implica necessidade; b) a solução de Aristóteles é restringir a bivalência; c) essa solução é coerente, e d) embora essa solução não elimine a possiblidade do fatalismo, consegue bloquear o argumento a favor dele oferecido no capítulo 9. (shrink)

My aim is to figure out whether Aristotle’s response to the argument for fatalism in De Interpretatione 9 is successful. By “response” here I mean not simply the reasons he offers to highlight why fatalism does not accord with how we conduct our lives, but also the solution he devises to block the argument he provides for it. Achieving my aim hence demands that I figure out what exactly is the argument for fatalism he voices, what exactly is his (...) solution, whether his solution is coherent, and whether it does indeed succeed. I find that the argument is essentially bivalence plus that the truth of a proposition stating that an event will happen in the future entails that this event will necessarily happen, that Aristotle’s solution is to restrict bivalence when it comes to propositions about contingent future events, that this solution is coherent, and that while it does not rule out the possibility of fatalism, it does succeed in blocking the argument for fatalism offered within chapter 9. (shrink)

"The central theme of the De interpretatione is the nature of contradiction between assertions. This is a crucially important theme for dialectic, whose regular tasks include that of establishing the contradictory of a proposed thesis, and that of replying to a dilemmatic question by choosing between the affirmation and the negation of a given thesis.(4) The inquiry into language as such, which occupies the first four chapters, is subordinated to this goal. One apparent obstacle to such a view of (...) the treatise is the (highly suspect). (shrink)