Today’s theme is Logic, or as seen the picture here, Dialectica. As the New Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Logic is the science and art which so directs the mind in the process of reasoning and subsidiary processes as to enable it to attain clearness, consistency, and validity in those processes. The aim of logic is to secure clearness in the definition and arrangement of our ideas and other mental images, consistency in our judgments, and validity in our processes of inference.”
Aristotle is generally considered the “Founder of Logic,” although many others before him put themselves to the task of thinking about how we think. One of these, Zeno of Elea, was considered to have developed reductio ad absurdum, or the method of indirect proof. If something cannot be both true and false, then an argument can be made from reducing the statement to the absurd.
For example, “The earth is round. The earth is not flat. If it were flat, people would fall off the edge.” Since the earth cannot be both round and flat, the statement is true.
Another good example, from Wikipedia (Yes, I know. Don’t judge.), reads:
The ‘reduction to the absurd’ technique is used throughout Greek philosophy, beginning with Presocratic philosophers. The earliest Greek example of a reductio argument is supposedly in fragments of a satirical poem attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570 – c.475 BC). Criticizing Homer’s attribution of human faults to the gods, he says that humans also believe that the gods’ bodies have human form. But if horses and oxen could draw, they would draw the gods with horse and oxen bodies. The gods can’t have both forms, so this is a contradiction. Therefore, the attribution of other human characteristics to the gods, such as human faults, is also false.
Logic is mental training: once the words and language have been developed, we can think through situations, problems, and reason our way to clear conclusions that work in conjunction with the natural world. For example, if we seekers of Truth are to grow and understand how a symbol might be applied to our everyday lives, we need to understand not only what the symbol is, but how it works in the world around us, how nature employs it.
Logic utilizes the senses but the connection must be made in the mind to form usable conclusions. Logic is, to me, a fundamental aspect of any human being’s career, if one expects to progress through life and learn. We can learn Logic in the modern age via University, but this really teaches us about Logic, not how to employ our logical mind. It seems that only through discourse, or dialectica, are we able to truly develop logical thought processes and reasoning at a higher level. Masonic Philosophical Society, anyone?
As a side note, the Catholic Encyclopedia on newadvent.org has a very good article on Logic and its history. It’s concise and certainly doesn’t include manuscripts; I would encourage anyone with a keen interest in Logic or Dialectica to read Aristotle but also some of the pre-Socractic philosophers, whence a great deal of our modern ideas of logic come.
