Taxonomy of Reality by Syllogism

This chapter concludes my discussion of the epistemological dimensions of Aristotle’s logic. I offered delineation and discussion of some of the influences of his notion of term over his notion of taxonomy statement (and thus) over his notion of syllogism. My aim was neither to criticize these notions nor the system as a whole, of course, but rather to note the knotty package deal that they comprised. It was a tough, take-it-whole-or-leave-it, package deal. It offered a great lot and demanded too much. It offered the first and best theory of inference for over two millennia and a solution to the sophists challenge, in one neat parcel. It demanded the conflation of these two tasks by means of acceptance into logic of a series of (not always explicit) extra-logical intuitions which became increasingly antiquated and outdated but ever so hard to pinpoint and replace.