Indefinite versus definite. A suggestion that there is room for doubt, questioning, consideration. That an inclusive approach may be more interesting than the exclusive. That dogma or ideology are about control not truth. In formal logic, however, A is identified as a universal affirmative. A asserts. The Sophists asserted rhetoric. Aristotle asserted with genius. Using Aristotle’s logic, Thomas Aquinas asserted on behalf of organized Christianity. On his heels, herds of scholastics—masters of mediaeval academic obscurity—set out to capture language for their own purposes. Then the annoying thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tickled and amused, cut and thrust, and above all found ways to break through the obscurity in order to communicate. They wrote encyclopaedias and dictionaries which undermined the idea of the definite—that is, of the “definition.” But their suggestion of an indefinite and thus open language, full of possibilities, was quickly undercut by the formal logic of Kant and Hegel.
