The birth of proof: Modality and deductive reasoning

Abstract

This paper is a part of a larger project with my New Zealand colleagues, E.D. Mares and M.J. Cresswell, both of Victoria University of Wellington. Our project is to write A Natural History of Necessity, investigating the ways in which philosophers' notions of necessity developed and then tracing the changes that notion undergoes throughout philosophical history. Our aim is to take an historical approach to the question 'Where does necessity comes from?' My focus in the present paper is Aristotle's invention of the simple deductive system of syllogistic logic set out in Prior Analytics. What I want to illustrate is the extent to which we can say that Aristotle, writing some 2400 years ago, understood logical consequence as a modal notion. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.