Logic

Use in the book

The contrast between school practice and the book of Port Royal turns on doing and knowing. Logic’s usefulness lay in its exercise; a book may convey only rules and words. This is not the same criticism as rejecting those rules: a separate note pairs logic with poetics as arts whose received rules one does not simply invent. Abuses of logic are still possible, and a crank without a rope represents logic deprived of reason. The warning against placing love of parents in the head as a thesis or demonstration establishes another limit: intellectual formulation cannot perform every office of feeling and conscience.

Places to read

1. II, p. 649, entry 4, ¶1Exercise is distinguished from knowledge of rules and technical words.
2. I, p. 195, entry 2, ¶1Logic and poetics are singled out for received rather than invented rules.
3. II, p. 652, entry 9, ¶1The useless crank represents logic without reason.
4. II, p. 744, entry 4, ¶1Demonstration cannot replace the appropriate place of feeling and conscience.

Translation in this edition

The parenthetic “is (or was)” and restriction “only” in the Port Royal remark remain. The lexicon does not identify an unstated edition of that book or turn Joubert’s evaluation into a comprehensive history of logic.

Syllogism

French: syllogisme.

A brief fragment makes law the syllogism’s major premise. Elsewhere definitions and syllogisms cannot give virtue, which Joubert distinguishes from an intellectual operation even while allowing it to be communicated. The literary complaint replaces rhetorical figures with syllogistic forms and calculation, imagining criticism through countinghouses and bankers. The English translation retains syllogism and syllogisms in these different uses; the commercial image does not identify a particular formal fallacy.

Places to read: I, p. 183, entry begun p. 182, no. 7, ¶2; I, p. 215, entry 9, ¶1; II, p. 807, entry 3, ¶3.