Video: Why Do We Read the Organon?

As part of the Freshman Philosophy tutorial, students at Thomas Aquinas College read several passages from Aristotle’s Organon, a collection of books in which the philosopher lays out the foundation and method of logic  — or, as junior Mary Grace Brittain puts it, “the art of reasoning well.”

In the above video, shot on the California campus, Senior Tutor Dr. John Nieto, joined by a few students, explains why the Organon plays an important role in the College’s integrated curriculum. “Logic is difficult because we have to pay attention to various aspects of speech that we don’t usually look at, things we just take for granted, and think about the character that those statements have,” he says.

Fortunately, he continues, “Aristotle developed a series of works, several of which we read in our Freshman Philosophy tutorial, in which he works out the way in which the mind names things and the order that things have insofar as we name them, and then the way that we reason from those statements so that we come upon conclusions.”