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1 - The Prehistory of Logic

from I - The Development of Logic in Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2023

By
Nicholas Denyer
Edited by
Luca Castagnoli  and
Paolo Fait
Luca Castagnoli
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Paolo Fait
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Greeks were intensely competitive. Their historians dated events by who had won what in the Olympics (Thucydides 3.8.1, 5.49.1, Xenophon Hellenica 1.2.1, 2.3.1); they would hold athletic contests as we might hold a memorial service (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 58.1); they staged dramas as competitive spectator sport (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 56.3–5); they had beauty contests for both men and women (Athenaeus 13.610a, Andocides 4.42); and when they sneered at competitions, this was to express their own superiority over the winners (Xenophanes DK 21B2, Thucydides 1.22.4). In particular, Greeks had competitions in which competitors strove to outdo one another in reasoning and argument. Protagoras was, according to Diogenes Laertius 9.52, ‘the first … to arrange contests of speeches’, and he declares that he has taken part in many such contests himself (Plato Protagoras 335a).

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The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Logic , pp. 21 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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