The Organon Against Modern Logic: Why Aristotle Still Outflanks Analytic Philosophy

 

 

 Bust of the Stagirite: Aristotle.

 

A version of this essay was first written in 2014.

 

Introduction: An Old Arsenal for New Errors

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western philosophy congratulated itself on having “surpassed” Aristotle. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and their analytic heirs imagined that symbolic logic had finally corrected the muddled syllogisms of antiquity. Analytic philosophy crowned itself as the philosophy of clarity — all problems supposedly dissolved into formal notation.

Yet, the more one examines the structure of symbolic logic and analytic philosophy, the more hollow these claims appear. In fact, the Aristotelian Organon — that collection of six treatises on categories, propositions, syllogisms, demonstration, dialectic, and fallacies — retains a power of critique that modern logic and analytic philosophy cannot parry. Far from being antiquated, the Organon exposes the structural deficiencies of symbolic logic and shows analytic philosophy to be little more than a sophisticated workshop of sophisms.

 

Categories vs. Variables: Ontology Matters

Aristotle begins with Categories, because reasoning is not about empty symbols but about things that are. Substance, quality, relation, place, time — these are the irreducible lenses through which propositions have meaning.

Symbolic logic, however, deliberately strips propositions of any ontological grounding. Whether we say “Socrates is white” or “Pegasus is white,” formal logic treats them identically: ∃x (Wx ∧ Sx). The distinction between real and imaginary evaporates. This is more than a technical flaw — it is the obliteration of philosophy’s basic task, which is to discern what is from what is not.

By rejecting the Aristotelian categories, symbolic logic has become an abacus for symbol manipulation. It can check internal validity but cannot tell us whether what we are speaking of exists at all. The result is a logic without ontology — a tool, not a science.

 

Predication Reduced to Membership

For Aristotle, not all predications are alike. He distinguishes:

• Definition (what something is in essence),
• Genus (the broader class),
• Property (a necessary attribute),
• Accident (a contingent feature).

 

Modern logic flattens all these into set membership. “Socrates is a man” and “Socrates is musical” are both rendered as the same kind of formal inclusion. But in reality, one names Socrates’ essence and the other a fleeting state.

This reduction blinds modern philosophy to crucial metaphysical differences. Analytic metaphysics, when it attempts to rebuild notions of essence and accident, ends up re-inventing categories that Aristotle had already articulated with greater clarity. The Organon thus stands as a reminder: not all predication is equal, and knowledge requires distinguishing the essential from the accidental.

 

The Syllogism vs. Connectives

Symbolic logic celebrates its connectives: ∧, ∨, →, ¬. But for Aristotle, logic is not about stringing connectives. The syllogism is a form of demonstration in which a middle term mediates between major and minor to disclose the cause.

Example:

• All humans are mortal.
• Socrates is human.
• Therefore Socrates is mortal.

The power here is not just formal validity but explanation: mortality is predicated through humanity. Symbolic logic can reproduce the form but not the causal intelligibility. It confuses validity with knowledge.

As Aristotle insists in the Posterior Analytics, demonstration must show why something is so, not just that it is so. Symbolic logic, stripped of middle terms, cannot do this. It is form without substance.

 

Knowledge Requires Causes

Analytic philosophy prides itself on “truth-conditions” and “possible worlds.” But Aristotle already showed that truth alone is insufficient. Knowledge (epistēmē) requires knowing the cause (aitia). For example: the eclipse occurs not just because “the moon is in a certain position,” but because “the earth’s shadow falls upon it.” Symbolic logic cannot capture this causal necessity; it can only state correlations.

Hence, analytic philosophy collapses epistemology into description. It confuses semantics with science. Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics thus cuts straight through the emptiness of truth-conditional theories: to know is to know the cause, not merely the formal structure of a proposition.

 

The Death of Dialectic

Aristotle devotes an entire treatise, the Topics, to dialectic—the art of reasoning from probabilities, engaging opponents, testing premises in real argument. For him, philosophy is lived in dialogue, in the agora, in contest. Analytic philosophy, obsessed with formal precision, has all but abandoned dialectic. Its papers are technical demonstrations, its debates hair-splitting exercises in notation. But real inquiry, especially about contested questions of life, ethics, and politics, requires dialectical skill. Without dialectic, philosophy becomes a scholasticism cut off from life. Aristotle’s Topics shows us the antidote: logic must remain tethered to disputation, persuasion, and the messiness of human argument.

 

Sophistry Rediscovered

Finally, in Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle catalogued fallacies: equivocation, amphiboly, figure of speech, accident, begging the question. Read analytic philosophy today and you will find the same fallacies dressed in new notation. Entire careers have been built on equivocations between use and mention, or amphibolies in quantifier scope. Instead of dissolving sophistry, analytic philosophy has made a cottage industry out of it. Here the Organon exposes a bitter truth: analytic philosophy, far from being the cure to obscurity, is itself a sophistical workshop.

 

Conclusion: The Organon as Ars Critica

Symbolic logic and analytic philosophy present themselves as modern triumphs. Yet the Organon reveals them as impoverished.

• Categories show symbolic logic’s blindness to ontology.
• Predication reveals its flattening of essence and accident.
• Syllogism unmasks its confusion of validity with knowledge.
• Posterior Analytics shows its ignorance of causes.
• Topics highlights its abandonment of dialectic.
• Sophistical Refutations indicts its fixation on puzzles.

 

Aristotle still outflanks them. The Organon is not antiquated; it is an arsenal against the hollow pretensions of modern logic. Symbolic logic may calculate, analytic philosophy may chatter, but neither can yield knowledge of being. Only an organon grounded in ontology, causality, and dialectic can still do that. In the end, Aristotle’s lesson is simple: philosophy is not about manipulating symbols, but about knowing what is. Until modern philosophy rediscovers this, the Organon remains not surpassed but waiting, ready as ever to critique our errors.