Aristotle's "Topics": Source texts
waveletter
The "Topics" itself is widely available, but I recommend that you have
at least one complete collection of Aristotle's works in translation.
The standard set is
1. J. Barnes, ed., "The Complete Works of Aristotle," vols. I & II,
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984. The "Topics" is in the first
volume, and there its translator is W.A. Pickard-Cambridge.
For the original Attic Greek and another English translation by E.S.
Forster, you'll want to get the 2nd volume of the (Harvard University
Press) Loeb Aristotle Series:
2. "Aristotle: Posterior Analytics, Topica," trans. H. Tredennick &
E.S. Forster, resp., Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.
Other sources:
3. The Pickard-Cambridge translation is also available online in the
MIT Classics Archive: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/topics.html
4. There is a digital version of the "Topics" which can be yours for
six bucks off of Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001GDOKQ/ref=lpr_g_1/102-5272343-8591317?v=glance&s=ebooks
(Hopefully, that link will persist a while!) You'll need an Adobe or
Microsoft Reader to use it.
The "Topics" Books I and VIII, with related texts, translation, and
commentary can be found in
5. R. Smith, "Topics Books I and VIII," Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
If you're new to Aristotle's logic, then a text with running commentary
can be a useful way to understand the connections to The Philosopher's
other works and to the philosophical problems that the ancients
encountered and argued.
After it had been supplanted by predicate logic, beginning with Frege
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Aristotle's logic and its
theory of syllogism fell out of favor as a scholarly pursuit. But,
there has been a renewed interest in Aristotelian logic and the first
principles of his philosophy in general, beginning--I would
suggest--with the publication of J. Lukasiewicz, "Aristotle's
Syllogistic From the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic," Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1951. In a follow-up post to this one, I'll list some
of the secondary sources on Aristotle and his logic.
In the next post, I'll start a thread on the "Topics" Book I, Chapter
1.
Thanks!
--Ron
waveletter
OK, so what are the best secondary sources on Aristotle and his logic?
The purpose of this group is to cover Aristotelian logic, so here I
want to list some of the sources from the secondary literature that
address Aristotle in general and his logic in particular.
I think that a wondeful introduction to Aristotle has already been
given to us by Guthrie in the 6th volume of his history of Greek
philosophy: W.K.C. Guthrie, "A History of Greek Philosophy," vol. VI,
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.
Aristotle's logic is described in historical context by the Kneales, W.
& M. Kneale, "The Development of Logic," Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.
We have been reading the "Topics," and there are only a few texts in
English that focus on this work:
1. Most recent perhaps is P. Slomkowski, "Aristotle's 'Topics',"
Leiden: Brill, 1997.
2. I think that I already mentioned R. Smith, "Topics Books I and
VIII," Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. This book covers the first and last
books of the "Topics," which are the ones concerned with the general
principles of dialectical reasoning. The middle books, II-VII, cover
individual "topoi" or "topics" or "commonplaces" or, if you accept my
take on the translation, "situations", but these are not in the main
covered by Prof. Smith's book.
Thanks!
--Ron