ABSTRACT
Any serious attempt to reassess the impact of literacy on conceptions of rationality has to start with Aristotle. Aristotle’s historical position as the founding father of Western logic is unshakeable. For many, he not only discovered the grammar of human rationality but was its fi rst grammarian. Furthermore, the grammar he left to posterity, set out in the texts of the Organon, remained authoritative for more than two millennia. It was not revised in any radical way until modern times. In this sense Aristotle taught generations of Europeans not only how to reason but, more fundamentally, what rationality was.
