Aristotelian logic is valid for its purpose. It has its place, but that place is not at the top of human awareness.
The reason I spend so much time castigating Aristotelian logic is because it has serious limits. It is not equipped to deal with things beyond this realm, and has only limited use for things in this realm. It does not recognize any other realm. So you should understand Aristotelian logic as much as you can, but recognize that it only gets you so far. It’s what you use when there is no guidance from your convictions.
The real issue is the big raft of goofy assumptions people put with that logic, certain a priori assumptions that aren’t necessarily a part of the logic itself. This is the real moral scandal in Western epistemology. The whole world wants to hide the plain fact that the West is founded on pagan Germanic mythology. The basic assumptions about reality are the real problem; the logic is just the mechanism of how those assumptions are used and applied.
You cannot build an epistemology on the mechanism alone. Somewhere you have to make certain assumptions about what is morally right and wrong, how reality works in the first place. Logic by itself cannot offer anything of that sort. And in Western Civilization, those assumptions are fed by the ancient tribal Germanic mythology typically associated with things like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and literature like Beowulf.
It is plainly visible that everyone starts from certain moral assumptions and that everyone has an inborn sense of other realms outside what is discernible from the five senses. For Westerners to pretend they can approach the question of morality from neutral or objective ground is one of the biggest lies people tell themselves. It’s natural for people to assume what they were raised with is somehow the universal “objective truth” of things. That’s the Idol of the Tribe, one of Bacon’s “Idols of the Mind”
- Idols of the Tribe (Idola tribus): This is humans’ tendency to perceive more order and regularity in systems than truly exists, and is due to people following their preconceived ideas about things.
- Idols of the Cave (Idola specus): This is due to individuals’ personal weaknesses in reasoning due to particular personalities, likes and dislikes.
- Idols of the Marketplace (Idola fori): This is due to confusion in the use of language and taking some words in science to have a different meaning than their common usage.
- Idols of the Theatre (Idola theatri): This is the following of academic dogma and not asking questions about the world.
So while logic can help you see the assumptions by which you build your world-view, it cannot supply that world-view. And yes, Bacon was reacting against the limitations he saw in Aristotelian logic by offering what became the foundation for the Western Scientific Method, with its own limitations and flaws. Things happen that can never be explained by Bacon’s approach.
My point is that the whole of Western Civilization is founded on a lie. There’s nothing wrong with the tools, but the foundation itself is deeply flawed and frankly pagan. Western Christianity is a senseless perversion of the teachings of Jesus. His teachings don’t defy logic, but put logic in it’s place as a mere tool in the absence of revelation from the Creator.
