syllogistic

Updated: April 30, 2025

Now whereas the main objection, by which the study of the syllogistic logic has been weighed down and discredited in modern times, is this, that it encumbers the memory with formal distinctions, having no useful application to the real process and purposes of reasoning the procedure of Sir W. Hamilton might almost lead us to imagine that he himself was trying to aggravate that objection to the uttermost.

George Grote - Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.'

Mill's credit, the great critical power that could gather valuable truths from so many discordant sources, and the wonderful synthetic ability required to weld these and his own contributions into one organic whole. When Mr. Mill commenced his labors, the only logic recognized was the syllogistic.

- John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works : Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors

I looked into the laws of thought and into the postulates upon which the syllogistic logic is based, and it slowly became clear to me that from my point of view, the point of view of one who seeks truth and reality, logic assumed a belief in the objective reality of classification of which my studies in biology and mineralogy had largely disabused me.

H. G. (Herbert George) Wells - First and Last Things

In truth, many laws acquire force by mere custom, not by syllogistic necessity, like the arts: as Aristotle, the Phoebus of the Schools, urges in the second book of the Politics, where he confutes the policy of Hippodamus, which holds out rewards to the inventors of new laws, because to abrogate old laws and establish new ones is to weaken the force of those which exist.

Richard de Bury - The Love of Books : The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury

But while these conclusions appear to me undeniable, I must yet enter a protest, as strong as that of Archbishop Whately himself, against the doctrine that the syllogistic art is useless for the purposes of reasoning.

John Stuart Mill - A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive

The question is, whether the syllogistic process is one of inference, i.e. a process from the known to the unknown. Its assailants say, and truly, that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii; and Dr.

W. (William) Stebbing - Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic

Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of syllogistic reasoning.

John Morley - Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

But as this is itself syllogistic, it is useless, as a proof of a syllogism, against a man who denies the validity of this kind of reasoning process itself. Such a man cannot in fact be forced to a contradiction in terms, but only to a contradiction, or rather an infringement, of the fundamental maxim of ratiocination, viz.

W. (William) Stebbing - Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic

Between scholastic parlance and the spontaneously written popular languages, there yawned a wide gulf. Humanism since Petrarch had substituted for the rigidly syllogistic structure of an argument the loose style of the antique, free, suggestive phrase.

Johan Huizinga - Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

What of the unmorality of taking Kansas and Nebraska from the Indians? Was he syllogistic, analytic, intellectually hard? But was not Lincoln so too? Douglas derived from Jefferson through Jackson; Lincoln from Hamilton through Webster, whatever else could be said of them. Thus I read on through the night until I had finished all that Douglas and Lincoln had said at the six debates then finished.

Edgar Lee Masters - Children of the Market Place