Truth, Etc.: Six Lectures on Ancient Logic

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. Its six chapters discuss, first, certain ancient ideas about truth; secondly, the Aristotelian conception of predication; thirdly, various ideas about connectors which were developed by the ancient logicians and grammarians; fourthly, the notion of logical form, insofar as it may be discovered in the ancient texts; fifthly, the question of the 'justification of deduction'; and sixthly, the attitude which has been called logical utilitarianism and which restricts the scope of logic to those forms of inference which are or might be useful for scientific proofs. In principle, the book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. There is no scholarly apparatus of footnotes, and no bibliography. It can be read in an armchair. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find it interesting.

Jonathan Barnes was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College. For 25 years he taught at Oxford, being a Fellow first of Oriel and then of Balliol. He then spent eight years at the University of Geneva. He is now professor of ancient philosophy at the Sorbonne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many publications include The Ontological Argument (Macmillan, 1972); Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Clarendon Press, 2nd edition 1993); Aristotle (OUP, 1982); The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton UP, 1984); with J. Annas, The Modes of Scepticism (CUP, 1985); Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 1987); The Toils of Scepticism (CUP, 1990); The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (CUP, 1995); and Porphyry: Introduction (Clarendon Press, 2003). He lives in France.