History of Logic Seminar Series - Talk: Zoe McConaughey, "Aristotle’s dialogical syllogistic" (13.11.2025)
antpic...@gmail.com
The first Naples Workshop on the History of Logic was a great success, both in terms of participation and the quality of the discussions. We would like to thank everyone who participated, and we hope this positive outcome will encourage all of us to continue and expand our collaborative efforts in many new directions.
In that spirit, we are pleased to announce the first session of the second annual cycle of the History of Logic Seminar Series. The session will be held on Thursday, November 13, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. CET via Zoom.
To have the Zoom link, please contact us at historyofl...@gmail.com.
On this occasion, we will host a talk by Zoe McConaughey (University of Lille). Her talk is titled "Aristotle’s Dialogical Syllogistic." Here is a short abstract:
The development of syllogistic in the Prior Analytics is seen as one of Aristotle’s biggest contributions to the history of logic, making him nothing less than the father of Western formal logic. His contribution tends to be read as a major step away from the context of dialectical argumentation, which characterizes other logical treatises, the Topics in particular. This reading, however, has not gone unchallenged. Aristotelian scholars, such as Ernst Kapp or, more recently, Michel Crubellier, have insisted there is a continuity between the Topics and the Analytics. In this talk, I will uphold these continuity claims and propose a formal reconstruction of Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic in the modern formal framework of « Dialogical Logic » (in the Lorenzen-Lorenz-Rahman tradition). This formal reconstruction provides external evidence that Aristotle’s syllogistic can be cast in a dialogical context. These questions will require certain methodological considerations, and I will stress the hermeneutical difficulties that arise when studying an ancient logic.
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Kind regards,
Antonio