Journal of the History of Philosophy

Traditionally, the De Interpretatione is placed in the Organon between the Categories and the Prior Analytics. Where the Categories is about single terms and the Analytics about inferences, the De Interpretatione is about propositions. That traditional view is presupposed by most contemporary studies of the work, which “concentrate on a small number of passages, which have been treated as isolated oases of philosophical interest in an otherwise barren work,” highlights which include “Aristotle’s semantic theory of philosophy of language” in the first chapter, the first four “linguistic chapters,” and chapter 9 on the Sea Battle (1). I suppose that the square of opposition could be added to Whitaker’s list.

Whitaker, in this republication of a doctoral dissertation, wants to challenge both the traditional view and the contemporary concentration by instead studying the work as a coherent whole, whose subject, it turns out, is not propositions after all but “contradictory pairs, which are central to the working of dialectic” (2). The book then proceeds through the De Interpretatione, chapter by chapter. If he succeeds, the De Interpretatione will henceforth be read as preparation for the Topics, rather than for the Analytics. There are also three appendices examining the use of such contradictory pairs in Metaphysics IV, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics.

Thus, the first five chapters of the De Interpretatione explain the nature of assertions, name and verb, and “before that, how language is related to thought and to the real world, and how it is that utterances can make claims about things which are true or false” (8). Where names, verbs, and propositions are part of our ordinary understanding of language, contradictory pairs are not, but are a philosophical understanding of a linguistic structure that has a specifically philosophical, dialectical, purpose. The rest of the De Interpretatione, from chapter 6 on, is the examination of contradiction. Chapters 7–9 classify contradictory pairs by different criteria. Each of these chapters isolates an exception to “the rule that, in every contradictory pair, one member is true and the other false” (79). Chapter 7 looks at the first exception to the rule, “non-universal statements about universals” (91). Whitaker’s project looks good here, since he then shows the dialectical uses of such propositions, and denies their value for the deductive logic of the Analytics. Similarly, in Chapter 8 Aristotle looks at “apparently simple assertions . . . which are not single” (105), which also have important uses in dialectic. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the third exception to the rule, future singular assertions. One payoff of this book is to place the sea battle discussion in its Aristotelian context. [End Page 459] Whitaker says that most discussions of the sea battle assume that what is at stake is what he calls the “Principle of Bivalence” in which every assertion is either true or false. He instead insists that it is contradictory pairs, not single assertions, that are being tested by future contingents. He thus concludes: “Dialectic is a universal discipline, and its questioning can cover any subject where a question can be posed which has a right and a wrong answer. Chapters 7 to 9 . . . demonstrate that there are limits to the universality of dialectic” (128).

Whitaker follows the De Interpretatione chapter by chapter in the remainder of the book. He shows how the later chapters assist the dialectician in “sorting assertions into contradictory pairs” (181). And just as De Interpretatione begins with a consideration of the relation of language, thought, and the world, so it ends by showing the connection between contradictory propositions and opposed beliefs.

Whitaker rarely strays from the De Interpretatione to show how our understanding of dialectic is improved by attention to this prerequisite. When he does, for example in a very short discussion of the relation of problems and propositions in the Topics, the results are illuminating. I would have liked more. This book should be useful to the growing numbers of scholars interested in Aristotle’s art of dialectic...