  The Topics provide a manual for participants in the contests of dialectical argument as instituted in the Academy by Plato. Books 2–7 provide general procedures or rules (topoi) about how to find an argument to establish or refute a given thesis. The descriptions of these procedures—some of which are so general that they resemble logical laws—clearly presuppose a notion of logical form, and Aristotle’s Topics may thus count as the earliest surviving logical treatise. The Sophistical Refutations are the first systematic classification of fallacies, sorted by what logical flaw each type manifests (e.g. equivocation, begging the question, affirming the consequent, secundum quid) and how to expose them.