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The below is from Micheal Scanlan’s 1991 review in MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS.
This book is the third complete English translation in this century of Aristotle's Prior analytics, which was the first systematic study of formal proof and the historical origin of the field of logic. A reader might well ask whether such a new translation is justified, especially for one of the less readable and less read works in the Aristotelian corpus. The answer is yes, but not simply because of the inherent value of Aristotle's work in logic.
To understand why, a reader needs to be aware that this century has witnessed not only a revolution in our understanding of logic, but also path breaking work in applying that new understanding to the determination of what Aristotle was attempting to do in the Prior analytics. Translators at the beginning of this century (A. J. Jenkinson, 1928, in the Oxford translation; H. Tredennick, 1938, in the Loeb Library) were unduly influenced by a long tradition which found a basis for Aristotle's logic in notions of ontology and metaphysics. They did not see the essential issues in logic as arising from the study of deductive proof. The notions of "language", "semantics", and "deductive system", implicit in Aristotle and central in modern logic, play no role in these translations. The pioneering effort to rethink Aristotle's logic using modern logical theory originated with the Polish mathematical logician J. Lukasiewicz [ Aristotle's syllogistic from the standpoint of modern formal logic, Clarendon Press, Oxford; second edition, 1957]. Working in the framework of axiomatic deductive systems such as those of Whitehead and Russell and of Hilbert, he interpreted Aristotelian syllogisms as conditionals in which the antecedent is the conjunction of the premises of the traditional syllogism and the consequent is the traditional conclusion. Lukasiewicz used four axioms, two of which are conditionals corresponding to the syllogistic forms traditionally called Barbara and Datisi. Using an underlying deductive system involving propositional logic, Lukasiewicz showed that every other conditional corresponding to a syllogism recognized by Aristotle could be derived from these axioms. But he chided Aristotle for failing to recognize the need for propositional logic.
In the early 1970s, working independently, J. Corcoran and T. Smiley each gave treatments of Aristotle's logic as a natural deduction system that did not involve propositional logic. Aristotle's syllogisms were viewed as direct and indirect deductions in a language in which all sentences belong to one of the four categorical types. Aristotle's claimed "reduction" of all syllogisms to the two universal syllogistic forms of the first figure, traditionally called Barbara and Celerant, was seen as the proof-theoretic assertion that every deduction can be transformed into one using only these two rules. This approach accounts much more closely for the fine details of terminology and reasoning in specific passages of the Prior analytics than previous interpretations of Aristotle's logic. In addition, as was shown by Corcoran [J. Symbolic Logic 37 (1972), 696--702], Aristotle's logic is semantically complete when treated in this manner and does not require an (overlooked) propositional logic.
The translator has been guided by this recent work, especially that of Corcoran. It has affected such aspects as the choice of English equivalents for Aristotle's Greek and the inevitable interpretative choices made in any translation. This does not mean that the translation is a rewriting of Aristotle in the modern style. The translator has adhered to the recent tendency in Aristotle translations to translate Greek technical terms with one-to-one English equivalents as far as possible. This enables the Greekless reader to independently assess Aristotle's variations in terminology.
Debatable points of translation and general interpretation are taken up by the translator in an extensive commentary. Such commentary is essential for any nonspecialist attempting to read the Prior analytics. The only other modern English commentary available is that of Sir David Ross. It accompanies his Greek text of the Analytics, which unfortunately includes only an English paraphrase and presupposes more familiarity with Greek than can generally be expected in modern readers. The Ross commentary also suffers by being overly influenced by nineteenth-century conceptions of logic, and of Aristotle's logic in particular. In contrast, the present translator has put to good use in his commentary the rethinking of Aristotle's logic found in the recent literature, to which he himself has actively contributed. A reader familiar with modern logic, while not perhaps feeling right at home, will often find here explanations of Aristotle's procedure that use familiar concepts, such as deduction, countermodels, and existential instantiation.
A substantial twenty-page introduction provides an overview of Aristotle's logic from the point of view of the recent literature. It is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to gain an up-to-date perspective on this scholarship. There are, naturally, some points to which a knowledgeable reader may object. For instance, the definition in the Introduction (p. XX) of an indirect Aristotelian deduction is misstated. Likewise, the commentary for 43b1-11 describes a decision procedure which does not seem to correspond to what is being discussed in the Aristotelian text. But such instances are few and hardly detract from the overall work. The volume is very well produced, with few misprints, and is easy to use. All of this means that, in the foreseeable future, this is the volume that contemporary logicians should and will reach for when they want to learn about the origin of their field.
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