A Structural and Content Analysis of the Ninth Chapter of Aristotle's «De interpretation»

The ninth chapter of De interpretation is one of the important logical works of Aristotle. This paper has tried to provide an accurate and comprehensive analysis of this chapter's structure and its major and minor discussions. Many of Aristotle's commentators believe that his main problem in this chapter is to deny the necessity of future events. But a careful review of this chapter shows that Aristotle's main problem in this regard is in explaining and establishing the claim that "none of the items in the pair of negative and affirmative individual propositions regarding the future should necessarily be true or false", and the issue of the necessity or unnecessity of future events as well as some other important issues have been raised along with this claim. Much of Aristotle's remarks in this chapter has been devoted to his reasoning to support this claim. In this paper, we have presented a clear analysis and formulation of his argument and its introduction. A significant number of Aristotle's commentators have claimed that by stating such viewpoints, he has violated the principle of contradiction. But attention to the exact meaning of that claim on the one hand, and the provisions of the principle of contradiction on the other, show that the claim does not in any way violate the principle of contradiction.