Editing Prior Analytics (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:Aristotle Opera Logica.jpg|thumb|236px<!--(approx Sidebar/Infobox)-->|Page from a 13th/14th-century Latin transcript of Aristotle's ''Opera Logica''.]]
Aristotle's ''Prior Analytics'' represents the first time in history when Logic is scientifically investigated. On those grounds alone, Aristotle could be considered the Father of Logic for as he himself says in ''[[Sophistical Refutations]]'', "When it comes to this subject, it is not the case that part had been worked out before in advance and part had not; instead, nothing existed at all."<ref>{{cite book |editor=Jonathan Barnes |title=The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle |page=27 |year=1995 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=0-521-42294-9 |quote=History's first logic has also been the most influential...}}</ref>

=== Ancient commentaries ===
In the third century AD, [[Alexander of Aphrodisias]]'s commentary on the ''Prior Analytics'' is the oldest extant and one of the best of the ancient tradition and is available in the English language.<ref>{{cite book |last=Striker |first=Gisela |title=Aristotle: ''Prior Analytics'', Book 1 |page=xx |year=2009 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-925041-7}}</ref>

In the sixth century, [[Boethius]] composed the first known Latin translation of the ''Prior Analytics'', however, this translation has not survived, and the ''Prior Analytics'' may have been unavailable in [[Western Europe]] until the eleventh century, when it was quoted from by [[Bernard of Utrecht]].<ref>{{cite conference |url=http://www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/VOL4/huygens.html |title=Looking for Manuscripts... and Then? |author=R. B. C. Huygens |conference=Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association |volume=4 |year=1997 |publisher=Illinois Medieval Association}}</ref> 

The so-called ''Anonymus Aurelianensis III'' from the second half of the twelfth century is the first extant Latin commentary, or rather fragment of a commentary.<ref>{{cite book |last=Ebbesen |first=Sten |title=Greek-Latin philosophical interaction |pages=171–173 |quote=Authoritative texts beget commentaries. Boethus of Sidon (late first century BC?) may have been one of the first to write one on ''Prior Analytics''. |year=2008 |publisher=Ashgate Publishing Ltd. |isbn=978-0-7546-5837-5}}</ref>

=== Modern reception ===
Modern work on Aristotle's logic builds on the tradition started in 1951 with the establishment by [[Jan Łukasiewicz]] of a revolutionary paradigm. His approach was replaced in the early 1970s in a series of papers by [[John Corcoran (logician)|John Corcoran]] and [[Timothy Smiley]]<ref>Egli, Urs. 1986. "Stoic Syntax and Semantics." Pp. 135–47 in ''Les Stoiciens et leur logique'' (1st ed.), edited by J. Brunschwig. Paris: Vrin. (2nd ed., 2006, pp. 131–48.) "We should not let modern standard systems force us to distort our interpretations of the ancient doctrines. A good example is the Corcoran-Smiley interpretation of Aristotelian categorical syllogistic which permits us to translate the actual details of the Aristotelian exposition almost sentencewise into modern notation (Corcoran 1974a; Smiley 1973). Lukasiewicz (1957) once thought that most of Aristotle's more specific methods were inadequate because they could not be formulated in the modern systems then known. He arrived at such a formulation only by distorting Aristotle's thought to a certain degree. In this respect Corcoran's interpretation is far superior in that it is very near to the texts while being fully correct from the point of view of modern logic."</ref>—which inform modern translations of ''Prior Analytics'' by Robin Smith in 1989 and [[Gisela Striker]] in 2009.<ref>*Review of "Aristotle, Prior Analytics: Book I, Gisela Striker (translation and commentary), Oxford UP, 2009, 268pp., $39.95 (pbk), {{ISBN|978-0-19-925041-7}}." in the ''Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews'', [http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18787 2010.02.02].</ref>

A problem in meaning arises in the study of ''Prior Analytics'' for the word ''syllogism'' as used by Aristotle in general does not carry the same narrow connotation as it does at present; Aristotle defines this term in a way that would apply to a wide range of [[valid argument]]s. In the ''Prior Analytics'', Aristotle defines syllogism as "a deduction in a discourse in which, certain things being supposed, something different from the things supposed results of necessity because these things are so." In modern times, this definition has led to a debate as to how the word "syllogism" should be interpreted. At present, ''syllogism'' is used exclusively as the method used to reach a conclusion closely resembling the "syllogisms" of traditional logic texts: two premises followed by a conclusion each of which is a categorical sentence containing all together three terms, two extremes which appear in the conclusion and one middle term which appears in both premises but not in the conclusion. Some scholars prefer to use the word "deduction" instead as the meaning given by Aristotle to the Greek word ''syllogismos'' (συλλογισμός). Scholars [[Jan Lukasiewicz]], [[Józef Maria Bocheński]] and Günther Patzig have sided with the [[Antecedent (logic)|Protasis]]-[[Consequent|Apodosis]] [[dichotomy]] while [[John Corcoran (logician)|John Corcoran]] prefers to consider a syllogism as simply a deduction.<ref>{{cite book |last=Lagerlund |first=Henrik |title=Modal Syllogistics in the Middle Ages |pages=3–4 |quote=In the ''Prior Analytics'' Aristotle presents the first logical system, i.e., the theory of the syllogisms. |year=2000 |publisher=BRILL |isbn=978-90-04-11626-9}}</ref>