Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Syllogism   Listen
Syllogism

noun
1.
Deductive reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from two premises.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Syllogism" Quotes from Famous Books



... with a syllogism, which he calleth the scope of my discourse (I know not by what logic, the proposition being forged by himself, and contrary to my discourse); thus ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... Since we can't produce it, let us deduce it. Major premise: the seats are cheap. Minor premiss: the plays are good. Conclusion: A People's Theatre. How much will you give me for my syllogism? Not a slap in the eye, ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence

... very serious; the more so, from the syllogism being so admirably formed. I should very much like to be enlightened on the subject. But, alas! I can no longer command my attention. There is such a confusion in my head of the words cash, money, services, capital, interest, that, really, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... some strange alchemy of her mind, three things stood out clear. They stood out like the three facts of a simple syllogism. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater<11> of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith: the deepest mysteries our contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity—with incarnation and resurrec- tion. I can answer all the objections ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... reasoning occur in dealing with the matter reasoned about; but I find that a pure science of relation has a necessary place in the system of knowledge, and that the formulae known as laws of contradiction, syllogism and causation are useful guides in the framing and testing of arguments and experiments concerning matters of fact. Incisive criticism of traditionary doctrines, with some remarkable reconstructions, may be read in Dr. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... divested themselves of their uniform disguise of novelty. Swann listened to all the scattered themes which entered into the composition of the phrase, as its premises enter into the inevitable conclusion of a syllogism; he was assisting at the mystery of its birth. "Audacity," he exclaimed to himself, "as inspired, perhaps, as a Lavoisier's or an Ampere's, the audacity of a Vinteuil making experiment, discovering the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... Hamilton does not, as Mr. Mill asserts, say that "the Unconditioned is inconceivable, because it includes both the Infinite and the Absolute, and these are contradictory of one another." His argument is a common disjunctive syllogism. The unconditioned, if conceivable at all, must be conceived either as the absolute or as the infinite; neither of these is possible; therefore the unconditioned is not conceivable at all. Nor, secondly, is Sir W. Hamilton guilty of the "strange confusion of ideas" which Mr. Mill ascribes to ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... propositions, and of reasoning from them. His logic is at once the art of thinking and the instrument of thought. The completeness of our knowledge depends on the extent and completeness of our experience. His manner of reasoning is by the syllogism, an argument consisting of three propositions, such that the concluding one follows of necessity from the two premises, and of which, indeed, the whole theory of demonstration is only an example. Regarding logic as the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... repress all vice and crime, reclaim all criminals, and give to the race generally a keen devotion to duty. A belief in a State where even this will be realized is deeply implanted in human nature, and Socialism itself might easily get a major premise from it. The syllogism would run thus: (1) A better State is bound to come. (2) It cannot come under the system of private capital. (3) Therefore that system must be abolished. So would we all say if the minor premise were true—"The good State is impossible under private ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark

... centuries, were not so blinded by the white light of vision as to disown the Greeks. They made the Ethics of Aristotle the four-square walls of the city of God; they expressed the mysteries of the Undivided Three in terms of the Syllogism. Thus they refused to cut themselves off from the aristocracy of human genius. They laid hands—but not violent hands—on the heritage of the ages. No philosophers have ever equalled their bold and lowly-minded profession of faith in the solidarity of human reason. For this ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas

... immutability of the supreme Reason, while her own reason was left there to struggle for its life amid a roaring shoreless waste of doubts and darkness? Oh, how grand, and clear, and logical it had all looked half an hour ago! And how irrefragably she had been deducing from it all, syllogism after syllogism, the non-existence of evil!—how it was but a lower form of good, one of the countless products of the one great all-pervading mind which could not err or change, only so strange and recondite in its form as ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... which natural phenomena could have no power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning. Men learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they mistook for education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad space of the world of God mainly as a place for exercise of horses, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... in the war to the allied powers, and especially to the neutral nations. The relation of the neutral nations, in modern warfare, which requires such immense supplies, is a factor of great importance for success in the field. Therefore, to close the syllogism, the mountainous character of the Vosges country was the primary factor in determining the relation of all other countries to the Central Powers, a factor constantly arising at every point in the Great War. On such geographical factors does the strategy of huge campaigns depend. One more ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... All women love babies; babies do nothing but cry; therefore, women love crying; there couldn't be a syllogism more irrefutable." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... collectively and frequently individually, object to the amount of time it takes to decide a case. They do not enjoy sitting and deliberating over a problem unless it is tremendously fascinating. The ramifications or the mystery of a syllogism can become a weariness and a bore. The jury-room itself may and frequently ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... no systematic tradition upon this complicated struggle. When war began between Russia and the Porte in 1771, we supported Russia and helped her to obtain an establishment in the Black Sea. Towards the end of 1782 when Catherine by a sort of royal syllogism, as Fox called it, took the Crimea into her own hands, the whig cabinet of the hour did not think it necessary to lend Turkey their support, though France and Spain proposed a combination to resist. Then came Pitt. The statesman whose ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... tendencies of causes considered singly, and then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred to me as the most complete ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... Thinking can be educed only from expressed Thought, but the Law is not objective thought, any more than the idea of the sculptor is marble, or the conception of the painter is paint. The simplest expression of thought is not the syllogism but the logical proposition. Now, it is plain that if the proposition is the formulation—the material representative of thought—if we study it as we study other natural symbols, we will find in it the fundamental Law of Thinking, ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter

... more Ernest deliberately excited them. He had an encyclopaedic command of the field of knowledge, and by a word or a phrase, by delicate rapier thrusts, he punctured them. He named the points of their illogic. This was a false syllogism, that conclusion had no connection with the premise, while that next premise was an impostor because it had cunningly hidden in it the conclusion that was being attempted to be proved. This was an error, that was an assumption, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... well pleased it should be so; you are poor; you will have more time to devote to my malady, and a greater interest in curing me. What think you of the syllogism?" ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... later while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There," Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form," and during the battle of Chateau-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic Bias ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone. With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of Chambertin. Well had it been if the same quick sense of propriety had attended him in the peddling propensity to which I have formerly alluded—but this was by no means the case. Indeed to say the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... our own logic particularly, for it is generally wrong. We never know where we are to end if once we begin following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a man's own heart that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing or two that have never yet been stated in controversy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and are only ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... responsible for the validity of that book, and we may defy all the smart Alecks and devils in the universe to invalidate a single essential word of it. The gist of the whole matter reduces to a simple syllogism. ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... in character, resting altogether upon that idea of the infinite' which the human mind can neither put aside nor comprehend."[III-17] And so a theory which will be generally regarded as much too physical is transferred by a single syllogism to metaphysics. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... does not bind up truth in logical formulae,—logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he imagines to 'contemplate all truth and all existence' is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have ...
— The Republic • Plato

... infinite, or finite, spirit, have too often been enlisted in the service of superstition. But the human faculties are fortified by the art and practice of dialectics; the ten predicaments of Aristotle collect and methodize our ideas, [59] and his syllogism is the keenest weapon of dispute. It was dexterously wielded in the schools of the Saracens, but as it is more effectual for the detection of error than for the investigation of truth, it is not surprising that new generations of masters and disciples should still revolve in the same ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon



Words linked to "Syllogism" :   minor premiss, deduction, synthesis, conclusion, deductive reasoning, minor premise, syllogistic, subsumption, ratiocination, syllogise, major premiss, syllogize, major premise, syllogist



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com