Workshop in Ancient Philosophy (Thursday - Week 2, MT25)

Abstract: In his Paraphrasis of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Themistius claims that the intellect grasps the per se attributes of which axioms are composed. However, he does not give any examples, leaving his account unsubstantiated. I aim to show that Aristotle’s principles of non-contradiction and of excluded middle, which are axioms common to all demonstrative sciences, are derivable from the per se attributes that are part of Aristotle’s definition of contradiction.