Corkum, Phil: Is Aristotle’s Syllogistic a Logic?

_History and Philosophy of Logic_ 47 (2):201-216. 2026Some of the more prominent contributions to the last fifty years of scholarship on Aristotle’s syllogistic suggest a conceptual framework under which the syllogistic is a logic, a system of inferential reasoning, only if it is not a theory, a system concerned with ontology or general facts. I argue that this a misleading interpretative framework. I begin by noting that the syllogistic exhibits one mark of contemporary logics: syllogisms are i