Many presuppositions, but only philology. Philosophy, by contrast, especially today, does not need them, since it lives from out of the basic presupposition that everything is as it should be. Indeed, the consideration treats of matters that are designated as belonging within philosophy, but our kind of treatment is nothing philosophical, its results are no philosophy.
Aristotle can offer us a pointer in the demarcation: φιλοσοφία and διαλεκτική and σοφιστική.1
On §3
Purpose: to understand some basic concepts, to attend to conceptuality. What is to be understood by this? This must go to prove wherein we have to transpose ourselves in order to be able to pursue concept-formation and to understand conceptuality in the concrete.
Things to be shown:
1. Where we encounter the concept exposed?
2. What that means, why in this case in particular it is determined in this way, and why the definition according to the decisive experience?
3. The enrooting of the conceptual wherein?
4. From there the next course of the consideration.
According to tradition, “logic” treats of the concept. “Logic” as discipline—determinate type of treatment of a delimited realm of objects—arose only when logical research had run itself into the ground. Plato and Aristotle know nothing of “logic”—an outgrowth of philosophy in the Hellenistic schools. What was here collected in a scholastic way passed into medieval and modern logic as a fixed inventory and was at the same time handed down, as “logic,” as a fixed inventory of questions and problems.
Logic knows, on the authority of Aristotle, something like definition: definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam. Reflected in this rule is the fate of Aristotle’s researches.
Definitions:
a) homo animal rationale.
b) The circle is a curved, closed line, all of whose points are equidistant from a point within it.
c) The clock is a machine put together from various wheels, whose coordinated movement indicates the time.
Ad 1. we encounter the concept exposed in the definition. What the logic of the schools says about it is shown in Kant. It is evident thereby how the tradition becomes relatively vital and determines research and how, at the same
1. Met. Γ 2, 1004 b 22 sq.: περὶ μὲν γὰρ τὸ αὐτὸ γένος στρέφεται ἡ σοφιστικὴ καὶ ἡ διαλεκτικὴ τῇ φιλοσοφίᾳ.