
Kant’s famous remark that Aristotle’s logic presents a “closed and completed doctine” has been traditionally interpreted, both by philosophers and historians of logic, as claiming that Aristotle provides the last word in logic. Given the later developments of Leibniz, Frege, Peirce, and others, such an interpretation paints Kant’s conception of logic as remarkably naive and historically uninformed. I argue here that Kant’s understanding of logic, and its history, is considerably more sophisticated than he has traditionally been given credit for, and that his remark tells us much more about Kant’s conception of logic, as a set of rules that are necessary and universal (a priori) for the possibility of thought, than it does about what he thinks of Aristotle.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kurt-mosser/10/
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