Background:
The
Organon was used in the school founded by Aristotle at the
Lyceum, and some parts of the works seem to be a scheme of a lecture on logic. So much so that after Aristotle's death, his publishers (
Andronicus of Rhodes in 50 BC, for example) collected these works.
Following the collapse of the
Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, much of Aristotle's work was lost in the Latin West. The
Categories and
On Interpretation are the only significant logical works that were available in the early Middle Ages. These had been translated into
Latin by
Boethius. The other logical works were not available in Western Christendom until translated to Latin in the 12th century. However, the original Greek texts had been preserved in the
Greek-speaking lands of the
Eastern Roman Empire (aka
Byzantium). In the mid-twelfth century,
James of Venice translated into Latin the
Posterior Analytics from Greek manuscripts found in Constantinople.
The books of Aristotle were available in the early Arab Empire, and after 750 AD Muslims had most of them, including the
Organon, translated into Arabic, sometimes via earlier Syriac translations. They were studied by
Islamic and
Jewish scholars, including Rabbi
Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and the Muslim Judge
Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes (1126–1198); both were originally from
Cordoba, Spain, although the former left Iberia and by 1168 lived in Egypt.
All the major scholastic philosophers wrote commentaries on the
Organon.
Aquinas,
Ockham and
Scotus wrote commentaries on
On Interpretation. Ockham and Scotus wrote commentaries on the
Categories and
Sophistical Refutations.
Grosseteste wrote an influential commentary on the
Posterior Analytics.
In the
Enlightenment there was a revival of interest in logic as the basis of rational enquiry, and a number of texts, most successfully the
Port-Royal Logic, polished Aristotelian term logic for pedagogy. During this period, while the logic certainly was based on that of Aristotle, Aristotle's writings themselves were less often the basis of study. There was a tendency in this period to regard the
logical systems of the day to be complete, which in turn no doubt stifled innovation in this area. However
Francis Bacon published his
Novum Organum ("The New
Organon") as a scathing attack in
1620.
[2] Immanuel Kant thought that there was nothing else to invent after the work of Aristotle, and a famous logic historian called
Karl von Prantl claimed that any logician who said anything new about logic was "confused, stupid or perverse." These examples illustrate the force of influence which Aristotle's works on logic had. Indeed, he had already become known by the Scholastics (medieval Christian scholars) as "The Philosopher", due to the influence he had upon medieval theology and philosophy. His influence continued into the Early Modern period and Organon was the basis of school philosophy even in the beginning of 18th century.
[3] Since the logical innovations of the 19th century, particularly the formulation of modern
predicate logic, Aristotelian logic has fallen out of favor among many
analytic philosophers.
Baconian method, methodical observation of facts as a means of studying and interpreting natural phenomena. This essentially
empirical method was formulated early in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, as a scientific substitute for the prevailing systems of thought, which, to his mind, relied all to often on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of
science. After first dismissing all prejudices and preconceptions, Bacon’s method, as explained in
Novum Organum (1620; “New Instrument”), consisted of three main steps: first, a description of facts; second, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees; third, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the
phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.
Bacon may be credited with recognizing, in their essence, the method of agreement, the joint method, and the method of concomitant variations. His emphasis on the exhaustive cataloguing of facts, however, has since been replaced as a
scientific method, for it provided no means of bringing investigation to an end or of insightful delimitation of the problem by creative use of hypotheses.