Premise order in Aristotle's syllogistic

Abstract

The practice of writing the major premise before the minor premise is no doubt traceable to Aristotle himself; nevertheless, it is for Aristotle just a general tendency, not yet a rigid convention, and there are numerous syllogisms in which the minor premise is stated first. After noticing that many of these seemed to be in the third figure, I examnined each of the syllogisms in the Prior Analytics in order to discover whether any particular pattern could be seen in the premise order of the three figures. I shall present my principal findings, and then attempt to explain them. The Prior Analytics treats four hundred seventy-one syllogisms fully and clearly enough that we can determine both the figure and the premise order. In the first and second figures Aristotle's pronounced tendency is to put the major before the minor, and most of the relatively few exceptions to this practice can be explained on stylistic or contextual grounds.' Thus, of the two hundred forty-six first figure syllogisms, only forty-three have the minor given first, and thirty-five of these forty-three exceptions are quite understandable on contextual and stylistic grounds. And of the one hundred twenty-four second figure syllogisms, twenty-four have the minor premise first, and all but one (at 45a40-45bl) of these twenty-four exceptions are easily explainable on stylistic or contextual grounds. The second figure preference for the major thus seems to be of approximately the same strength as that in the first figure: the exceptions in the second figure are more frequent 19.4% as opposed to 17.5% but they are also more frequently explainable 95.8% as opposed to 81.4%. But in