De Interpretatione or Hermeneutics (Peri Hermeneias) is a work of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, mainly on the philosophy of language. Hermeneutics nowadays means the philosophical science of interpreting of texts (e.g. The Bible), but in greek hermeneuein also (and in the present case mainly) means „to declare” or „to enunciate”, so translating Hermeneutics as De Interpretatione is loose, a better translation would be De Propositiones.

The work is really discussing the philosophy of simple (e.g. cathegoric) propositions. It contains fundamental conclusions, achievements on classifying and defining some linguistic and (meta)logical phenomena like simple terms and propositions, nominals and verbs, negation, the quantity of simple propositions (primitive roots of the quantors in modern symbolic logic), investigations on the excluded middle (what to Aristotle isn't applicable to future tense propositions), and on modal propositions.

The first five-six chapters deal with names and words of the language, the second six chapters with propositions and simple propositions, included negation and quantity; the last three (12th-13th-14th) with modalities.

De Interpretatione is (the second) part of Organon, Aristotle's collected works on logic.

External links

• On Interpretation, translated by E. M. Edghill
  • http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/a8/intrpret.html