ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the essentials of Aristotle's modal syllogistic, that being the foundation on which the whole of medieval modal logic is built. Denominative terms, especially Aristotle's paradigm 'literate', will figure in the arguments of the medieval modal logicians. The modal logicians of the Middle Ages saw their enterprize as linked with a motley assemblage of Aristotelian texts, drawn from the Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations. The fundamental ideas in those texts are the idea of a term, a being, a categorical proposition and essential predication. Aristotle applies the per selper accidens distinction to terms as well as to relations between terms. At first sight, Aristotle's definition of denominative terms in the Categories seems hospitable to Platonism. One term may be related to another in a variety of interesting ways, four of which are theorized in Aristotle's doctrine of the predicables – definition, genus, peculiarity and accident.
