A term a day: Aristotle’s Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Syllogistic

“Aristotle’s most famous achievement as logician is his theory of inference, traditionally called the syllogistic (though not by Aristotle). That theory is in fact the theory of inferences of a very specific sort: inferences with two premises, each of which is a categorical sentence, having exactly one term in common, and having as conclusion a categorical sentence the terms of which are just those two terms not shared by the premises. Aristotle calls the term shared by the premises the middle term (meson) and each of the other two terms in the premises an extreme (akron). The middle term must be either subject or predicate of each premise, and this can occur in three ways: the middle term can be the subject of one premise and the predicate of the other, the predicate of both premises, or the subject of both premises. Aristotle refers to these term arrangements as figures (schêmata):

Aristotle calls the term which is the predicate of the conclusion the major term and the term which is the subject of the conclusion the minor term. The premise containing the major term is the major premise, and the premise containing the minor term is the minor premise.

Aristotle’s procedure is then a systematic investigation of the possible combinations of premises in each of the three figures. For each combination, he seeks either to demonstrate that some conclusion necessarily follows or to demonstrate that no conclusion follows. The results he states are exactly correct.”

via Aristotle’s Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).