Aristotle’s Laws of Thought, Part 1

I have just finished reading (and reviewing at Amazon) Avi Sion’s book “In Defense of Aristotle’s Laws of Thought,” (available for under $2 on Kindle). Sion does an outstanding job arguing for the irrefutable truth of these three axiomatic statements that form the base of standard logic. These three laws of thought are:

1)    A thing is what it is (the law of identity).

2)    A thing cannot at once be and not-be (the law of non-contradiction).

3)    A thing cannot neither be nor not-be (the law of the excluded middle).

As Sion makes clear, these laws are not arbitrary, and any attempt to deny their axiomatic primacy in the practice of logic (non-contradictory identification of the facts of reality) is fanciful. Sion writes:

“The validity of logic is thus itself an inductive truth, not some arbitrary axiom. Logic is credible, because it describes how we actually proceed to distinguish truth from falsehood in knowledge derived from experience. No other logic than the standard logic of the three laws of thought is possible, because any attempt to fancifully propose any other logic inevitably gets judged through standard logic. The three laws of thought are always our ultimate norms of discursive conduct and judgment. They point us to an ideal of knowledge we constantly try to emulate.”

Sion properly rips both the postmodern sophists (such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger) and the more ancient ones (such as Nagarjuna), who argue that rationality is arbitrary or involves circularity or infinite regression. He also explains why “fuzzy logic” does not negate Aristotelean logic.

But Sion is not without his flaws as a philosopher. This becomes particularly evident when Sion’s discourse focuses on Buddhism. Sion, a practicing Jew who is also deeply into Buddhism, informs us that “to be an effective logician first, then, one must learn ‘meditation’…” But then he rips irrational, contradiction-riddled, Buddhist philosophy without explaining why this meditation-intensive religion produced and subscribed to illogical metaphysics and epistemology. The Randian term for this is “blank out.”

Sion also stumbles when he turns his attention to spiritual metaphysics. He writes:

“Initially, this analogy to water seems to call for a universal underlying substance – an assumed “ether.” But as Einstein pointed out, since the velocity of light is the same in all directions and displays no Doppler effect, there can be no ether! Thus all is one and one is nothing! This interesting discourse of modern science seems to confirm the much older Buddhist view that the universal ocean is one of Emptiness (Shunyata). Judaism also has this notion of the All as originally Nothingness.”

Sion needs to reread Ayn Rand. He’s guilty of the reification of zero and buying into the absurd ex nihilo notion that something can come from nothing. Also, the 1920 book “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” (quoted in Wikipedia.org, under Aether Theories) hardly seconds his viewpoint regarding the ether:

“We may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an aether. According to the general theory of relativity space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this aether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.”

Aristotle’s Three Laws and Spiritual Reality

Until I read Ayn Rand’s “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” and really grokked Aristotle’s laws of thought, I was unable to “crack the cosmic code” and “put it all together” from a philosophical point of view. Despite his weaknesses as a philosopher, Sion’s text provided me with further insights regarding these “laws of thought.”

In truth, these “laws of thought” are not really laws of thought, but rather ontological laws of reality. But do these laws also hold true relative to spiritual Reality?

In my next post, “Aristotle’s Laws of Thought, Part 2,” I will consider what Sion doesn’t – the application of these laws to the apprehension of spiritual Reality.