Aristotle's De Interpretatione: Contradiction and Dialectic

Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system, basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis. By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it forms an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, the system of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's most famous texts.

Review: beautifully lucid and carefully reasoned ... the conventional wisdom is triumphantly refuted. Whitaker takes us through the de Interpretatione chapter by chapter, displaying it as a sequence of lessons for would-be dialecticians. He casts much new light on the overall structure and purpose of the remarks ... Before reading Whitaker, I too was in thrall to conventional wisdom; after reading Whitaker, things seemed to come into proper focus for the first time. Whitaker... uses his ingenuity to construct a reading that confronts, rather than evades, the subtleties of Aristotle's discussion, and to give, for the first time that I know of, a plausible account of them. * Nicholas Denyer, Mind *