Abstract

Throughout the classical period opposition is an increasingly important element of aetiological descriptions and of procedures for regulating inference. Contrary to Lloyd and to structuralist critics, archaic Greek thought is not oppositionally structured. Hesiod's Theogony, in particular, is not oppositionally structured. ;Anaximander is the first of the Ionians to employ a set of opposites, genesis and phthora, in aetiological description. Anaximenes employs a set of opposites, puknosis and araiosis, which describe a continuum on which there are an infinite number of possible physical states. Heracleitus removes his logos from allegiance to any particular set of physical predicates by making the conflict of opposites itself the fundamental principle of the cosmos. ;The identity of opposites which Heracleitus asserts is the problem which motivates the establishment of the conceptual categories which those opposites constitute, but the fragments of Heracleitus do not constitute a logic. ;Parmenides' poem contains both necessary rules for inference, , and, in the path of Truth, the image of an ontology, conceived as a realm on which opposites do not impinge. ;Early Plato follows a double path reminiscent of Parmenides. Particulars are subject to change; forms are unchanging. Particulars receive opposites; forms do not. Forms have opposites; particulars do not. As with Parmenidean scholarship, Platonic scholarship has been confused by the notion that Plato thought any term could be an opposite. This view is a projection of modern logical assumptions which Plato does not share. ;In Aristotle there is not one fourfold classification of opposites but a more adaptive scheme in which Aristotle recognizes different conceptions of opposition as privileged or advantaged with respect to tasks of differentiation in ontology, logic, and epistemology. Logical opposites are fundamental to Aristotelian undertakings in aetiological description and inference. Privation is primary in the former; contradiction in the latter. The traditional classification is most useful in ontology and dialectic