Abstract

ARISTOTLE AS A DIALECTICIAN. Tom Nagel once wrote a paper on “What is it like to be a bat?” I am tempted to give this paper the somewhat less outlandish title “What would it be like to be Aristotle?” Notwithstanding the lip service some scholars have paid to the peculiarities of Aristotle’s ways of thinking as compared with ours, I have seldom felt that a commentator has managed to get inside Aristotle’s mind and made us grasp what made Aristotle tick—or, rather, think in the way he did. All too often Aristotle has been treated by twentieth century philosophers as if he were, to borrow an Oxonian phrase, just “a fellow of another college.” The reason for such an alienation is not a lack of any intuitive Einfühlung or intellectual sympathy in the eighteenth-century sense. It is not a Schelerian failure but a Collingwoodean one. It is typically a failure to grasp the problem context of Aristotle’s thought and to grasp his ultimate presuppositions. In my earlier work, I have sought to identify some of his presuppositions and problems. Only some of them are relevant here. One interesting background feature of Aristotle’s thinking about logic, reasoning and the scientific method is that he is considering such matters always in a dialectical context, in the sense of thinking of them on the model of question-answer dialogues not unlike the Socratic elenchus. That this was the model of Aristotle’s methodology in the Topics is of course fairly obvious. Yet what is not usually noted is that Aristotle is still in the two Analytics thinking of the scientific method as an interrogative process. What constitutes the bridge between the overtly dialectical framework of the Topics and the syllogistic framework of the two Analytics is the idea that logical inferences are those answers to questions that are logically implied by the respondent’s earlier answers.