ABSTRACT
The issue of nominalism vs realism is an old one, and it is interesting to review the way in which it has become connected with the philosophy of logic. Modern "quantification theory", as the corresponding branch of modern logic is called, or "first-order logic with identity", has an immensely larger scope than the logic of Aristotle, but the topic of concern is recognizably similar. The most important thing, however, is that with modern notation we can analyze inferences which essentially involve two-or-more-term relations. It was essentially the failure to develop a logic of relations that trivialized the logic studied before the end of the nineteenth century, and that makes that logic. The traditional logic from Aristotle on, and even including the work of Boole, tremendously important as it was for later developments, utterly inadequate for the analysis of deductive reasoning in its more complicated forms.
