Corcoran on Aristotle’s Logical Theory

Abstract

Jan Łukasiewicz, by his own account, entered the lists in 1923 as an interpreter of ancient logic from the standpoint of modern formal logic. In that year he began defending his view of the contrast of Stoic logic with Aristotelian logic; this view appeared in print for the first time in 1930.¹ This was followed by the Polish version in 1934, and the German in 1935, of his landmark paper, ‘On the History of the Logic of Propositions’ [9]. During the same period Łukasiewicz was lecturing on Aristotle’s syllogistic. An authorized version of his lectures on this and other logical topics was published by students at the University of Warsaw in 1929, republished in Warsaw in 1958, and finally translated into English in 1963 under the title Elements of Mathematical Logic [7]. Łukasiewicz elaborated his researches until he issued in 1951 his now famous monograph Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. A second edition, enlarged but not revised, appeared in 1957, its author’s death having occurred in the previous year [6].