



Produced by Sue Asscher





EUTHYDEMUS

by Plato


Translated by Benjamin Jowett





INTRODUCTION.

The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an elaborate
jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly claim to be
the oldest treatise on logic; for that science originates in the
misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first efforts of
speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear
in the Sophistici Elenchi of Aristotle and are retained at the end of
our manuals of logic. But if the order of history were followed, they
should be placed not at the end but at the beginning of them; for they
belong to the age in which the human mind was first making the attempt
to distinguish thought from sense, and to separate the universal from
the particular or individual. How to put together words or ideas, how
to escape ambiguities in the meaning