Venn Said It Couldn't Be Done

The scope and content of ancient formal logic was determined by Aristotle's Organon and, in particular, the Doctrine of the Syllogism wlhiclh, as it has come to us, contains no diagrams. Nonetheless, so suiggestive is the language and imanner of presentation of the syllogistic schelm-a, that many logicians lhave speculated as to the possibility that Aristotle miiade use of spatial concepts in his actual lectures... . Isolated diagrams using somne formn of geometric figure to denote a proposition or syllogism occurred in the works of a number of sixteenth-century logiciaiis... . It was, lhowever, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who first devoted serious study to the analysis of logical propositions by means of diagramns.