What is logic?

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The history of logic should be of interest to anyone with aspirations to thinking that is correct, or at least reasonable.
This story illustrates dierent approaches to intellectual enquiry and human cognition more generally. Reecting on
the history of logic forces us to reect on what it means to be a reasonable cognitive agent, to think properly. Is it to
engage in discussions with others? Is it to think for ourselves? Is it to perform calculations?
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant stated that no progress in logic had been made since
Aristotle. He therefore concludes that the logic of his time had reached the point of completion. There was no more
work to be done. Two hundred years later, after the astonishing developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with
the mathematisation of logic at the hands of thinkers such as George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred
Tarski and Kurt Gdel, its clear that Kant was dead wrong. But he was also wrong in thinking that there had been
no progress since Aristotle up to his time. According to A History of Formal Logic (1961) by the distinguished
J M Bocheski, the golden periods for logic were the ancient Greek period, the medieval scholastic period, and the
mathematical period of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Throughout this piece, the focus is on the logical traditions that
emerged against the background of ancient Greek logic. So Indian and Chinese logic are not included, but medieval
Arabic logic is.)
Why did Kant disregard the scholastic tradition? And, more generally, what explains the decline of logic after the
scholastic period? Though in the modern era logic remained an important part of the educational curriculum, there
were no fundamental innovations to speak of (with the important exception of some developments in the 17th
century, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). In fact, much of the scholastic achievement got lost, and the logic taught in
this period (the one Kant was referring to) was for the most part rudimentary. To be sure, the decline of scholastic
logic didnt happen at once, and in some regions (eg, Spain) innovative work in the scholastic tradition continued to
emerge well into the 16th century. However, generally speaking, scholastic logic became less and less prominent
after the end of the Middle Ages, except for educational purposes at universities (but again, in watered-down
versions).
There were many causes of the decline of scholastic logic. Perhaps the most famous was the damning criticism by
Renaissance authors such as Lorenzo Valla. These thinkers deplored the lack of applicability of scholastic logic.
Valla, for example, saw syllogisms arguments composed of two premises and one conclusion, all of which are of
the form Some/All/No A is (not) B, whose premises necessitate the truth of the conclusion as an articial type of
reasoning, useless for orators on account of being too far removed from natural ways of speaking and arguing. They
harshly criticised the ugly, cumbersome, articial and overly technical Latin of scholastic authors, and defended a
return to the classical Latin of Cicero and Vergil. For the most part, these critics did not belong to the university
system, where scholasticism was still the norm in the 15th century. Instead, they tended to be civil servants, and
were thus involved in politics, administration and civic life in general. They were much more interested in rhetoric
and persuasion than in logic and demonstration.
Another reason logic gradually lost its prominence in the modern period was the abandonment of predominantly
dialectical modes of intellectual enquiry. A passage by Ren Descartes yes, the fellow who built a whole
philosophical system while sitting on his own by the replace in a dressing gown represents this shift in a
particularly poignant way. Speaking of how the education of a young pupil should proceed, in Principles of
Philosophy (1644) he writes:
After that, he should study logic. I do not mean the logic of the Schools, for this is strictly speaking
nothing but a dialectic which teaches ways of expounding to others what one already knows or even
of holding forth without judgment about things one does not know. Such logic corrupts good sense

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rather than increasing it. I mean instead the kind of logic which teaches us to direct our reason with a
view to discovering the truths of which we are ignorant.
Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic
of discovery. Its chief purpose is justication and exposition, which makes sense particularly against the background
of dialectical practices, where interlocutors explain and debate what they themselves already know. Indeed, for
much of the history of logic, both in ancient Greece and in the Latin medieval tradition, dialectic and logic were
taken to be synonymous.
Up to Descartess time, the chief application of logical theories was to teach students to perform well in debates and
disputations, and to theorise on the logical properties of what follows from what, insofar as this is an essential
component of such argumentative practices. Its true that not everyone conceived of logic in this way: Thomas
Aquinas, for example, held that logic is about second intentions, roughly what we call second-order concepts, or
concepts of concepts. But as late as in the 16th century, the Spanish theologian Domingo de Soto could write with
condence that dialectic is the art or science of disputing.
The tight connection between traditional logic and debating practices dates back to the classical Hellenistic period.
Intellectual activity then was quintessentially a dialogical aair, as registered in Platos dialogues. In these
dialogues, Socrates regularly engages in the practice of refutation (elenchus), which consists in an exchange of
questions and answers in which interlocutors would be led to grant the opposite of what they stated at the beginning,
on the basis of their answers along the way. And two of Aristotles logical texts, the Topics and the Sophistical
Refutations, are explicitly about dialectical practices and contain a regimentation of these practices by way of an
abstract description of their structural features.
The Prior Analytics, the most abstract of Aristotles logical texts, is lled with dialectical vocabulary and references to
debating practices. For example, he examines the matter of nding the right premises for the conclusion one wants
to establish a sort of reverse engineering. The techniques discussed are particularly useful in debating. If an
arguer wants to convince her interlocutors of proposition P, she searches for other propositions which imply P, and
which the interlocutors are likely to grant. Having granted T and Q, which together imply P, the interlocutor is then
compelled to agree with P. Clearly, as Descartes would later bemoan, this is an approach best suited to argue with
and convince others, not for the discovery of new truths.
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The prominence of dialectic continued through late antiquity. By the Latin medieval period, the focus on debating
became even more pronounced when it was institutionalised with the emergence of what is known as scholastic
disputation. Scholastic disputation is a formalised, rigorous procedure of debate, based on fairly strict rules. It was
inspired by ancient Greek argumentation methods, and was further developed in the monasteries of the early Middle
Ages (perhaps surprisingly, given their reputation for the contemplative life). It reached its pinnacle in the 12th
century with the birth and expansion of universities, where it became a primary teaching method, alongside textual
commentary. And the inuence of disputations went well beyond universities, expanding towards multiple spheres of
cultural life. Disputations were one of the main approaches for intellectual enquiry in medieval Europe.
A disputation starts with a statement, and then goes on to examine arguments in favour and against the statement.
This procedure is reminiscent of the game of questions and answers described by Aristotle in the Topics, where the
initial statement can be read as a question: X, yes or no? It is essentially a dialogical practice in that it features two
parties disagreeing on a given statement and producing arguments to defend their respective positions, even if both
roles can be played by one and the same person. The goal might be simply that of convincing your interlocutor or the
audience, but the implication is typically that something deeper is achieved, such as coming closer to truth on the
matter in question by means of examining it from many dierent angles.

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Medieval intellectuals engaged in live disputations both privately, between a master and a student, and as grand
public events attended by the university community at large. But the general structure is also used extensively in
some of the most prominent writings by medieval authors (some of which are in fact written-up versions of
disputations that actually took place, known as reportatio). Logical textbooks provided the required training to excel
in the art of disputation, with chapters on fallacies, on consequence, on the logical structure and meaning of
propositions, and on obligationes (a highly stylised disputation), all of which are directly relevant for the art of
disputation (though some are also applicable to other ends, such as textual interpretation and commentary).This
widespread presence of disputations and related genres has been described as the institutionalisation of conict.
The downfall of the disputational culture roughly coincided with the introduction of new printing techniques in Europe
Disputations were chiey tied to the university culture of the later Middle Ages. Tellingly, in the passage above,
Descartes speaks of the logic of the Schools, therefore criticising a whole approach to education based on
disputations and their underlying logic. Renaissance thinkers criticised scholasticism for its lack of engagement in
issues that really mattered for society at large, and prioritised the orator over the scholastic debater as the ideal
intellectual. The excessive formalism of scholastic disputations came to be vilied and mocked, for example in
Molires play Le Malade imaginaire (1673) or The Imaginary Invalid, where the pedantic and rather foolish Thomas
Diafoirus resorts to disputational vocabulary to make a point about love:
Distinguo, Mademoiselle; in all that does not concern the possession of the loved one, concedo, I
grant it; but in what does regard that possession, nego, I deny it.
The fall of disputational culture wasnt the only cause for the demise of scholastic logic, however. Scholastic logic
was also viewed rightly or wrongly as being tied to broadly Aristotelian conceptions of language and
metaphysics, which themselves fell out of favour in the dawn of the modern era with the rise of a new scientic
paradigm. Despite all this, disputations continued to be practised in certain university contexts for some time
indeed, they live on in the ceremonial character of PhD defences. The point, though, is that there was a dramatic
break in philosophical style in the early modern period: compare a great text of medieval thought, Summa
Theologica (1265-1274) by Thomas Aquinas, which is thoroughly disputational, with Meditations on First Philosophy
(1641) by Descartes, a book argued through long paragraphs driven by the rst-person singular. The nature of
intellectual enquiry shifted with the downfall of disputation.
It is also not happenstance that the downfall of the disputational culture roughly coincided with the introduction of
new printing techniques in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. Before that, books were a rare
commodity, and education was conducted almost exclusively by means of oral contact between masters and pupils
in the form of expository lectures in which textbooks were read out loud, disputations of various kinds, examinations.
By the time of Descartes roughly two centuries later, the idea that a person could educate themselves on their own
by means of books (which would have been virtually unthinkable before the wide availability of printed books) was
well-established.
Moreover, as indicated by the passage from Descartes above, the very term logic came to be used for something
other than what the scholastics had meant. Instead, early modern authors emphasise the role of novelty and
individual discovery, as exemplied by the inuential textbook Port-Royal Logic (1662), essentially, the logical
version of Cartesianism, based on Descartess conception of mental operations and the primacy of thought over
language. However, from the perspective of the 21st century, medieval scholastic logic is perhaps more deserving of
the title logic than the work done under this heading in the early modern period, given that it comes closer to the
level of rigour and formal sophistication that came to be associated with logic from the late 19th century onwards.
In the modern period, a number of philosophers came to see the nature of logic in terms of the faculties of mind. To

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be sure, this is again a theme present in medieval scholastic thought (in the work of the 14th-century author Pierre
dAilly, for example), but in the early modern period it became the dominant view. This leads us back to Kant, for
whom logic pertained above all to the structure of thought as such and the operations of the mind, such as in his
interpretation of Aristotelian categories. For Kant, quintessential logical concepts such as drawing an inference from
premises to conclusion are associated to internal operations of the mind rather than to moves in an argumentative
situation.
While Kants views on logic remained inuential, in the 19 th century logic took yet a dierent turn, this time towards
mathematics. With The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847), Boole, a highly innovative English mathematician,
inaugurated a whole new research programme. This approach had antecedents in the 17th century, especially but
not exclusively with Leibniz. (Thomas Hobbes also held that all thinking was a matter of calculation.) However, Boole
appears to have been largely unaware of these earlier developments, as most of his early education was self-taught,
including advanced mathematics.
Boole developed a method to calculate whether an argument was correct or not, in stark contrast with the
catalogue-based approach of traditional logic. Booles work launched what is known as the algebra of logic tradition,
and pushed forward the idea of using mathematical symbolism in connection with logic. Boole was responding to a
growing interest in logic among mathematicians, and he mostly remained Kantian in his thought, but his work
undoubtedly represents a turning point in the history of logic: it kicks o the mathematical period singled out by
Bocheski as one of the most prolic periods in the history of logic.
The other towering gure in 19th-century logic is Frege. A professor of mathematics in the German town of Jena, for
the rst years of his career he worked on standard mathematical topics such as geometry and analysis, but
eventually developed philosophical interests despite having no formal philosophical training. While Boole (whom
Frege harshly criticised) used mathematics to analyse logic (syllogisms), Freges project was to use logic to analyse
mathematics. More specically, Frege wanted to provide mathematics with purely logical foundations, an eort that
became known as the logicist programme. He intended to derive all truths of arithmetic from purely logical principles
(axioms), using only logical rules. To this end, however, Frege had to mathematise logic so as to make it suitable
for the logicist programme, in particular by taking the mathematical notion of function as the main conceptual
building block of his system. Explicitly inspired by the 17th-century tradition of articial languages (Leibnizs work in
particular), Frege devised an entirely new notation for his system, which he called concept-script (or Begrisschrift).
In the preface to his book Begrisschrift (1879), he oers an illuminating description of the motivations for
introducing this new language:
My initial step was to attempt to reduce the concept of ordering in a sequence to that of logical
consequence, so as to proceed from there to the concept of number. To prevent anything intuitive
from penetrating here unnoticed, I had to bend every eort to keep the chain of inferences free of
gaps. In attempting to comply with this requirement in the strictest possible way, I found the
inadequacy of language to be an obstacle; no matter how unwieldy the expressions I was ready to
accept, I was less and less able, as the relations became more and more complex, to attain the
precision that my purpose required. This deciency led me to the idea of the present concept-script.
Its rst purpose, therefore, is to provide us with the most reliable test of the validity of a chain of
inferences and to point out every presupposition that tries to sneak in unnoticed, so that its origin can
be investigated.
The idea that ordinary language is expressively inadequate to account for mathematical (or even logical) reasoning
became a recurring theme in the ensuing tradition of mathematical logic, so much so that the term symbolic logic
became synonymous with this tradition. Doing logic came to mean simply working with special symbols, not with
ordinary words. In this respect, it is worth noting that the humanist authors had criticised the Latin of scholastic

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logicians precisely as too articial, and even the Greek language that Aristotle relies on for syllogistic logic is
regimented and removed from ordinary ways of speaking at the time. In a sense, perhaps a certain degree of
articiality is at the core of logic throughout history, as it operates at levels of abstraction that are at odds with
ordinary language usage.
Frege was not the only one working on the foundations of mathematics with logical tools. Indeed, by the end of the
19th century there were many signicant projects of axiomatising portions of mathematics led by distinguished
mathematicians such as Richard Dedekind, Giuseppe Peano, Oswald Veblen and David Hilbert. But Frege was the
rst to realise that not only the axioms could be expressed in logical terms the rules of inference themselves
leading from axioms to further truths also required a rigorous treatment.
The history of logic leads us to question the individualistic conception of knowledge and of our cognitive lives we
inherited from Descartes
Unfortunately, Freges impressive theoretical cathedral lay on shaky grounds, as revealed by Russell with the
discovery of the paradox that bears his name. Freges logicist system allows for the existence of a collection that
both does and does not belong to itself contradiction! (An intuitive rendition of the key idea in Russells paradox is
the so-called barber paradox: imagine a barber who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.
The question is, does the barber shave himself? If he does, then he doesnt; if he doesnt, then he does.) It was with
the goal of recovering and further developing the logicist programme that Russell and his collaborator Alfred North
Whitehead went on to develop the monumental (and somewhat messy) system presented in their Principia
Mathematica (1910). Essentially, all major developments in logic in the 20th century are premised, directly or
indirectly, on the existence of Principia Mathematica.
To return to Bocheskis characterisation of the three grand periods in the history of logic, two of them, the ancient
period and the medieval scholastic period, were closely connected to the idea that the primary application of logic is
for practices of debating such as dialectical disputations. The third of them, in contrast, exemplies an entirely
dierent rationale for logic, namely as a foundational branch of mathematics, not in any way connected to the
ordinary languages in which debates are typically conducted. The hiatus between the second and third periods can
be explained by the fall from grace of scholastic disputations, and more generally by the fall of Aristotelianism as a
wide-ranging worldview.
However, traces of logics dialogical origins persist in recent developments, which means that taking the dialogical
or dialectical perspective into account is essential to come to a thorough understanding of the nature of logic even in
its more recent, mathematical instantiations also because mathematics itself is very much a dialogical aair. The
history of logic also leads us to question the overly individualistic conception of knowledge and of our cognitive lives
that we inherited from Descartes and others, and perhaps to move towards a greater appreciation for the essentially
social nature of human cognition.

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