35 - The Philosopher's Toolkit: Aristotle's Logical Works

Right, I sympathize. I think the closest thing to what you want is probably the series of commentaries on works (often single books within larger works) of Aristotle published by Oxford University Press. The series is called "Clarendon Aristotle".

There was some variation in the placement of ethics - either early as preparation to become a good student of philosophy, or late and then in theory it could include all of practical philosopy, so also political philosophy. But leaving that aside it was logic, then physics, then psychology (which is actually part of physics/natural philosophy), then metaphysics.

It should be borne in mind though that there are two rival or complementary curricula. What I just described is the sequence of reading for the Aristotelian corpus, there was another sequence for Plato's dialogues (I think I talk about this in the Iamblichus episode). Sometimes they went through Aristotle and then graduated to Plato so that they had to work their way through two sequences.

By the way "epistemology" was not a discrete field of philosophy; it was covered within logic since that is where you have the Posterior Analytics.

Yes, I agree an easy way out is just to deny that there are truths or falsehoods about future events (except necessary ones, like "1+1=2 will still be true tomorrow"). There are downsides to this though: the most relevant one in the context of Aristotle's discussion is that in general, he accepts the principle of bivalence, namely that all meaningful assertions are either true or false. Another is that it is intuitive to say that predictions can be true or false at the moment uttered, e.g. if I now say "Donald Trump will be elected President" you would think I am saying something that is already true or false (hopefully false!).

As a matter of pure logic it doesn't matter what order the two premises are in but they do talk about "major" (the first) and "minor" (the second) premises and some logicians probably saw a kind of epistemic relevance there (like, I start with the major and add the minor in order to reach the conclusion).

But logically your notation is not different from mine, really: my way of writing it is to try to bring out the fact that the M term is the glue between A and B or in your notation S and P.

Here is a list of the figures, and from this you'll see that the fourth figure never involves a universal conclusion which makes it differ from the first figure barbara.

Certainly your background and interests could be relevant, but all else being equal I would say the Nicomachean Ethics. It is the most readable and engaging major work and gives you a sense of how he writes (though maybe a bit misleading because it is more polished than most other treatises). Plus it is probably the work that plays the largest role in the contemporary reception of Aristotle. The ancients began teaching Aristotle with logic, in particular the Categories, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend that!

After the Ethics, reading Physics 1-2 would be a next good step, perhaps then De Anima.
 

Right, there are (at least) two ways to take Aristotle's solution. One is the so-called "traditional" reading and it states that now, it is not yet true or false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. The other is the "non-traditional" reading and according to it, his solution is what you say: it is now true (not false) that there will be a sea battle but we don't yet know this, and the truth is a contingent one. If this is what he wanted to say, he struggled to express the idea clearly, since later ancient and medieval readers mostly seem to have taken the first interpretation. Modern day interpreters do not agree which reading is the correct one. Of course the two readings disagree about whether there could have been a truth in, say, 1800 AD that I would never have a sister: the first reading would say no (not yet either true or false), the second yes (true, but contingently so).

Not quite sure what you mean, but maybe you are referring to substance vs accident and universal vs particular, so that we should have (a) universal substance, (b) particular substance, (c) universal accident, (d) particular accident? If that is what you mean then examples would be for instance: (a) humanity, (b) Socrates, (c) baldness, (d) Socrates' baldness. Does that help?