From the new issue of The Classical Teacher:
The most basic question we can ask about anything is “What is it?” Young children explicitly ask this question all the time. But even adults do it, although they may not do it explicitly, or even think about doing it at all. We ask this about words we don’t know, and things we encounter for the first time. We even engage in definition when we write a mission statement for an organization—or for ourselves. It is something that all of us do, and yet few of us can explain the right way to do it.
Maybe we need … a definition of definition. We can find this in the old discipline of material logic that goes back to Aristotle …
Read the rest here.