Johannes Philoponus: Commentariae Annotationes In Libros Priorum Resolutivorum Aristotelis

In the history of logic, the description of various facts of formal logic in illustrative figures played a large role. One of the most well-known figures is the famous pons asinorum oder Eselsbrücke (mnemonic). This figure can be found for the first time in Johannes Philoponos’s commentary on the ›Ersten Analytiken des Aristoteles‹ (Prior Analytics) . The Greek Aristotelians made an important contribution to the development of syllogistics. Some of their contributions, such as the Eselsbrücke, were passed down to Latin tradition by Averroes and Albert the Great. Most of them however had to wait for the translations done in the 16th century before they came into their own in the context of the argumentation theory.