Organon

Ancient commentators grouped the treatises as Organon, meaning instrument, within debates over logic’s relation to philosophy. Aristotle did not prescribe this title or collection. The work’s identity therefore includes original treatises together with later compilation, curricular arrangement and commentary, whose connections are not identical to the surviving books’ conventional order.

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On Interpretation examines names, verbs and assertions, distinguishing truth-bearing statements from other speech. Affirmation, denial and statements about all or some subjects provide materials for inference. This connects linguistic structure with argument while separating the meaning of a term, the claim of a sentence and consequences drawn from several sentences.

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Prior Analytics investigates when conclusions follow necessarily from premises, comparing term positions and proposition combinations. Whether an inference follows differs from whether its premises are true. Valid patterns and counterexamples turn individual arguments into structures open to general investigation, making inference itself an object of systematic study.

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Posterior Analytics addresses demonstration and first principles; Topics investigates argument from accepted opinions; Sophistical Refutations examines apparent arguments. These concern different conditions of knowledge rather than one technique of persuasion. Later teaching organized them into a course, while modern interpretation distinguishes their questions and methods from the scope of subsequent logical systems.

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