The system of syllogism

I. Reason and Syllogism

Since Aristotle, syllogism has cast a fateful shadow upon the power of reason. Recognized to be the great conveyor of rationality, syllogism has equally been acknowledged to be beset by limits.

Neither Plato, nor his greatest pupil, Aristotle, see fit to restrict reason to syllogistic inference. Given how every syllogism operates with premises, they recognize that if reason were confined to syllogizing, it could never account for the assumptions on which its conclusions ultimately rested. Any attempt to ground those premises would require further inferences whose own premises would always stand in need of further deduction. The unconditioned knowledge required for philosophical wisdom would instead depend upon transcending the limits of syllogism, something Aristotle and Plato sought by employing an intuitive understanding of first principles-those privileged givens that allegedly have an absolute immediacy mediating everything else that is and can be known. Such intuitive cognition would then empower syllogism to infer what would follow from the first principles.

The role of syllogism takes on a different cast, though, once the intuitive understanding of first principles is called into question. Privileged givens can never be shielded from sceptical challenge since immediacy can be ascribed to any content and no immediacy can be justified by anything else without forfeiting its alleged primacy. If the repudiation of intuitive understanding leaves reason with no resource other than syllogism, philosophical argument is condemned to an empty formality, where every inference rests upon premises that can never be fully proven. At best, syllogism becomes a regulative imperative, leaving reason ever seeking, but never attaining, the unconditioned condition of judgments.

Whether syllogism be supplemented by an intuitive intelligence or left alone as reason's solitary device, it can hardly account for its own defining nature, let alone provide an exhaustive treatment of its particular types. Inference cannot be inferred without taking itself for granted. Further, because inference employs premises that are given rather than derived, it can no more legitimate its own concept than that of its premises. Moreover, no empirical survey of inference can reliably locate its own nature, since what observed examples share may be contingent rather than necessary commonalities.

To be logically accounted for, syllogism must be determined apart from any contingent content. This does not mean that syllogism per se is completely formal. It does have a content consisting minimally in the mediated succession of terms comprising inference. Commonly, these terms are identified as three successive judgments, which are just as commonly assumed to be determined in their own right and only externally related through the inference to which they belong. The connection of inference thereby appears to be something subjective, rather than objective, residing not in the content of the judgments themselves, but in the arrangement imposed upon them from without, by some syl-logizer. Even if a conclusion is ...

If you are already a vLex customer, Access Here