At a first glance, the Bear who often finds himself stuck in unconventional places and who absentmindedly eats honey meant for birthday gifts and Heffalump traps may not amount to much more than a simple children 's’ book character. Perhaps, a second or a third glance will still generate the same shallow interpretation. However, a reader with philosophical understanding will recognize some uncanny resemblances between the teachings of philosophers and the little trite comments that are ubiquitous within A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. As the beloved Bear goes on his daily adventures, his spoken and unspoken words present a clever demonstration of the philosophies of Socrates, Descartes, and Aristotle.
While snippets of philosophical musings were
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Among these ideas was the application of logic through the deductive method of syllogisms, which was based on correlation of terms (Gaarder 112). Milne uses a disjunctive form of syllogism in his introduction of one of his characters, Owl. As Pooh searches for Eeyore’s missing tail, he says to himself, “It’s Owl who knows something about something … or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh … Which it is … So there you are” (Milne 48). Although Pooh’s musings follow a structure different from that of Aristotle’s original syllogism, it is clear that Pooh’s deduction that Owl is knowledgeable enough to help him find Eeyore’s missing tail follows the same syllogistic concept proposed by Aristotle. Another similarity between Aristotle and Pooh appears when as Pooh and Christopher Robin set out to rescue Piglet. When his human companion inquires about the location of The Floating Bear, Pooh explains, “Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometimes it’s more of an Accident. It all depends… On whether I’m on the top of it or underneath it” (Milne 143). This demonstrates Aristotle’s distinction between substance, what something is made up of, and form, the characteristics of something that makes something what it is. For example, according to Aristotle, a chicken’s form is that it lays eggs and cackles, so when it dies and loses its ability to lay eggs and cackle, it loses its form; thus, even if its substance remains, it is no longer a chicken (Gaarder 108). By differentiating between a boat and an accident by its quality of either being underneath or above something else, Pooh indicates how his jar is defined by its