The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters. The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to...

Ancient accounts of Aristotle credit him with 170 Constitutions of various states; it is widely assumed that these were research for the Politics, and that many of them were written or drafted by his students. Athens, however, was a particularly important state, and where Aristotle was living at the time; it is plausible that, even if students did the others, Aristotle did that one himself, and possible that it was, intended as, a model for the rest....

One of the middle or transitional dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, "Gorgias" depicts a dinner gathering attended by Socrates and a group of sophists. Gorgias, a foreigner, has been drawn to Athens by its cultural and intellectual sophistication. In this dialogue Plato contrasts Gorgias, the rhetorician, with Socrates, the philosopher, whose differing specialties are persuasion and refutation, respectively. As Plato delves into arguments...

OUR next task is to study coming-to-be and passing-away. We are to distinguish the causes, and to state the definitions, of these processes considered in general, as changes predicable uniformly of all the things that come-to-be and pass-away by nature. Further, we are to study growth and 'alteration'. We must inquire what each of them is; and whether 'alteration' is to be, identified with coming-to-be, or whether to these different names there correspond...

Early in the beginning of spring, and through the summer, and towards winter, many of those who had been long gradually declining, took to bed with symptoms of phthisis; in many cases formerly of a doubtful character the disease then became confirmed; in these the constitution inclined to the phthisical. Many, and, in fact, the most of them, died; and of those confined to bed, I do not know if a single individual survived for any considerable time;...

Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) is one of the best known of the Ancient Greeks, and his Hippocratic Oath is still in use today. An ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens, Hippocrates is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, known simply as the Father of Western medicine in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of medicine....

Let us now discuss sophistic refutations, i.e. what appear to be refutations but are really fallacies instead. Some reasonings are genuine, while others seem to be so but are not, is evident. This happens with arguments, as also elsewhere, through a certain likeness between the genuine and the sham.

There are many things in philosophy, my dear Brutus, which are not as yet fully explained to us, and particularly as you very well know that most obscure and difficult question concerning the Nature of the Gods, so extremely necessary both towards a knowledge of the human mind and the practice of true religion: concerning which the opinions of men are so various, and so different from each other, as to lead strongly to the inference that ignorance72...

All instruction given or received by way of argument proceeds from pre-existent knowledge. This becomes evident upon a survey of all the species of such instruction. The mathematical sciences and all other speculative disciplines are acquired in this way, and so are the two forms of dialectical reasoning, syllogistic and inductive; for each of these latter make use of old knowledge to impart new, the syllogism assuming an audience that accepts its...

Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) is one of the best known of the Ancient Greeks, and his Hippocratic Oath is still in use today. An ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens, Hippocrates is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, known simply as the Father of Western medicine in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of medicine....