Abstract

Peirce’s theory of the origin of abduction in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics II.25 is based on his account of abduction as a second-figure syllogism. Peirce read the difficult and (what he thought to be) corrupted passage of Prior Analytics II.25 and tried to amend its errors and explain its difficulties in order to argue that Aristotle was trying to present a syllogism in the second figure that infers a case, which is Peirce’s definition of abduction. “[H]e would not be Aristotle, to have overlooked [the] question” whether such an inference sometimes occurs, said Peirce in his 1901 paper “The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents” (CP 7.249). Several years after suggesting that Aristotle had described..