Monday, September 18, 2017

Logic, Holism, Atomism

Aristotle's Logic is Holistic.  It is presented in a work called Organon, the first section of which is called the Categories, the fundamental topic of which is the formal relations between Genus and Species, which, according to his Holism, are related as Whole to Part.  Accordingly, that relation is reflected in his subsequent study of Deduction, in the third section, called Prior Analytics, in the formulation Universal to Particular, i. e. 'particular' connotes a Part.  In contrast, Modern Logic is Atomistic, the fundamental contrast of which is Universal and Individual, with the latter independent of the former, as is expressed in the formulation 'there is an x such that . . .', which, in the case of the predicate 'is a human', signifies a relation other than one in which a Whole is prior to a Part.  So, even if Modern Logic is commonly taught as an ideologically neutral tool, its fundamental components are inherently prejudicial.

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