Die Aristotelische Topik: Ein Interpretationsmodell und seine Erprobung am Beispiel von Topik B., and: Aristotle's Topics (review)

In the last thirty years Aristotle's Topics have attracted a lot of scholarly attention, from de Pater's important 1965 monograph and Brunschwig's 1967 edition, with introduction and notes, of the first four books, to the more recent work of Zadro (1974) and Pelletier (1991). But as Joseph Bocheń ski remarked more than forty years ago, "so far no one has succeeded in saying briefly and clearly what [the τόποι] are" (Formale Logik [Munich 1956] 51). Suddenly we have two new attempts to fill this gap: Paul Slomkowski's revised D.Phil. thesis, Aristotle's Topics; and Primavesi's present work, which the author says can "zugleich als Vorstudie für die kommentierte Übersetzung der Topik gelten, mit der der Verfasser . . . betraut worden ist" (13). Slomkowski's work has striking similarities, in structure and execution, to Primavesi's; I have more to say about this below.

Primavesi's work will be of interest primarily to classicists and philosophers who specialize in Aristotle's logic and rhetorical theory, but anyone interested in the dialectical practices of the philosophical schools will also find much of value here. It is carefully written and admirably researched, and within the limits I discuss below it will remain an important contribution to our understanding of the Topics for some time.

The work is divided into two parts. In the first (Systematischer Teil), Primavesi argues for his main thesis: the Aristotelian τόποι, although lacking formal unity, are essentially a systematic set of instructions for the conversion of affirmative assertions used in dialectical disputations into the premises of a dialectical syllogism that can be used by the questioner in such an exercise to refute his opponent (103). In the second (Einzelanalysen), the individual chapters of book B of the Topics are examined τόπος to τόπος show how each is to be construed as such an instruction.

The starting point for the first part of the book is a pair of programmatic statements. According to A1 the Topics presents a method (μέθοδον, 100a18) of dialectical syllogism (100a23); according to A2 (101a25–27) the uses of the τόποι are in intellectual training (), casual encounters, and the philosophical sciences. If a dialectical syllogism is a kind of argument used in the philosophical schools and, thus, the primary use of the Topics is for academic training, what is the relationship between the kind of argumentation being explicated in the Topics and the formal proofs of the Analytics? The answer is to be found in an analysis of the τόποι themselves as presented in books B–H.

The argument is advanced in three central chapters, each of which begins with a clear statement of the problem to be addressed and ends with a succinct précis of the results of the investigation. In the first, Primavesi addresses the question, What is meant by dialectical syllogism? The second explains in what sense a dialectical syllogism is a syllogism. The third shows what Aristotle means when he calls the Topics a method of dialectical syllogism. A transitional chapter attempts a formal classification of the τόποι into five categories on the basis of the type of conversion involved.

Primavesi's account of the dialectical syllogism draws upon Aristotle's remarks in book Θ, our knowledge of the question–and–answer format of intellectual training, and the differences between Aristotle's and Plato's use of this format. His purpose is to establish the following points: (1) the dialectical syllogism is the result of an analysis of ; (2) a dialectical premise is always a yes–or–no question; (3) the dialectical syllogism is, in principle, to be elicited from one's partner in dialogue; (4) the dialectical syllogism is an , or nondemonstrative proof; (5) the respondent in the exercise has to accept on the spot...