Aristotle’s notion of experience occupies an important place in his account of scientific understanding and its methodology. It is linked, not only to sense-perception and the principles of skill and scientific understanding, but also, methodologically, to ἐπαγωγή. Due to its various involvements it has a complex job to perform. Such a complexity – or Janus-face – gives rise to many questions concerning its status and content. Many of these questions were raised in later antiquity. In the introductory part of the (...) paper I shall give a very brief summary of Aristotle’s notion of experience, concentrating on issues that will be relevant next, and then discuss the explanation we find in a commentary which has come down to us under the name of Philoponus. I do it in the hope that the discussion sheds light on novelties in the commentator’s approach which deserve attention. (shrink)

In Prior Analytics I.30, Aristotle seems too much optmistic about finding out the principles of sciences. For he seems to say that, if our empirical collection of facts in a given domain is exhaustive or sufficient, it will be easy for us to find out the explanatory principles in the domain. However, there is a distance between collecting facts and finding out the explanatory principles in a given domain. In this paper, I discuss how the key expression in the sentence (...) at 46a25 should be interpreted: “the true characteristics of things” (“τῶν ἀληθῶς ὑπαρχόντων τοῖς πράγμασιν”). I argue that, on a more accurate interpretation of the expression, Aristotle’s point would cease to look like a piece of naïve or even silly optimism. (shrink)

This article sketches, and works to motivate, a controversial approach to Posterior Analytics II.19. But its primary goal is to recommend a novel solution to one particular interpretive aporia that’s especially vexed recent scholars working on Post. An. II.19. The aporia concerns how to understand the enigmatic "ē ek pantos" ( “or from all...”) in the genealogical account of foundational knowledge at II.19 100a3-9. Our proposed solution to the aporia is discussed in connection with a number of larger philosophical issues (...) concerning Aristotle’s theory of epistēmē. (shrink)

Ethics for Rational Animals brings to light a novel account of akrasia, practical wisdom, and character virtue through an original and comprehensive study of the moral psychology at the basis of Aristotle's ethics. It argues that practical wisdom is a persuasive rational excellence, that virtue is a listening excellence, and that the ignorance involved in akrasia is in fact a failure of persuasion. Aristotle's moral psychology emerges from this reconstruction as a qualified intellectualism. The view is intellectualistic because it describes (...) practical wisdom as the sort of knowledge that can govern desire and action and akrasia as involving a form of ignorance. However, Aristotle's intellectualism is qualified because practical wisdom goes beyond grasping the truth about the human good, for it must also be able to convey the truth persuasively to non-rational cognition and desires. (shrink)

In Prior Analytics 1.27–30, Aristotle develops a method for finding deductions. He claims that, given a complete collection of facts in a science, this method allows us to identify all demonstrations and indemonstrable principles in that science. This claim has been questioned by commentators. I argue that the claim is justified by the theory of natural predication presented in Posterior Analytics 1.19–22. According to this theory, natural predication is a non-extensional relation between universals that provides the metaphysical basis for demonstrative (...) science. (shrink)

Aristotle is famous for thinking that all our knowledge comes from perception. But it's not immediately clear what this view is meant to entail. It's not clear, for instance, what perception is supposed to contribute to the more advanced forms of knowledge that derive from it. Nor is it clear how we should understand the nature of its contribution—what it might mean to say that these more advanced forms of knowledge are "derived from" or "based on" what we perceive. Aristotle (...) is often thought to have disappointingly little to say on these matters. I argue here that this thought is mistaken: a coherent and philosophically attractive view of perceptual knowledge can be found in the various texts in which Aristotle discusses perception's role in animal life, the cognitive resources on which it does and does not depend, and the relation it bears to practical and theoretical modes of understanding. This book offers a sustained examination of these discussions and their epistemological, psychological, and ethical implications. It defends an interpretation of Aristotle as a moderate sort of empiricist, who thinks that we can develop sophisticated forms of knowledge by broadly perceptual means—and that we therefore share an important part of our cognitive lives with nonrational animals—but also holds that our intellectual powers allow us to surpass these animals in certain ways and thereby develop distinctively human forms of understanding. (shrink)

For Aristotle, in making the deliberate choice to incorporate the extensive requirements of the young into the aims of one’s life, people realise their own good. In this paper I will argue that this is a promising way to think about the ethics of care and parenting. Modern theories, which focus on duty and obligation, direct our attention to conflicts of interests in our caring activities. Aristotle’s explanation, in contrast, explains how nurturing others not only develops a core part of (...) the self but also lead to an appreciation of the value of interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

Aristotle thinks that an account, alogos, of some sort is characteristic of craft,technē. Some scholars think that thelogoselement oftechnēis tagged onto experience as a theoretical element not directly engaged in successful production: I argue instead that thelogosgrounds the productive ability of craft, and also that is practically orientated in a way that distinguishes it from thelogosof theoretical science. Understanding thelogosof craft thus helps us explain how the craftsman differs both from the merely experienced practitioner and from the theoretical scientist.

I offer a novel interpretation of Aristotle's psychology and notion of rationality, which draws the line between animal and specifically human cognition. Aristotle distinguishes belief (doxa), a form of rational cognition, from imagining (phantasia), which is shared with non-rational animals. We are, he says, “immediately affected” by beliefs, but respond to imagining “as if we were looking at a picture.” Aristotle's argument has been misunderstood; my interpretation explains and motivates it. Rationality includes a filter that interrupts the pathways between cognition (...) and behavior. This prevents the subject from responding to certain representations. Stress and damage compromise the filter, making the subject respond indiscriminately, as non-rational animals do. Beliefs are representations that have made it past the filter, which is why they can “affect [us] immediately.” Aristotle's claims express ceteris paribus generalizations, subject to exceptions. No list of provisos could turn them into non-vacuous universal claims, but this does not rob them of their explanatory power. Aristotle's cognitive science resolves a tension we grapple with today: it accounts for the specialness of human action and thinking within a strictly naturalistic framework. The theory is striking in its insight and explanatory power, instructive in its methodological shortcomings. (shrink)

Abstract In Posterior Analytics II.19 Aristotle raises and answers the question, how do first principles become known? The usual view is that the question asks about the process or method by which we learn principles and that his answer is induction. I argue that the question asks about the original prior knowledge from which principles become known and that his answer is perception. Hence the aim of II.19 is not to explain how we get all the way to principles but (...) to defend the claim that our knowledge of them originates in perception. Aristotle explains how we learn principles earlier in book II, in his account of definitional inquiry. In II.19 he explains how we reach by induction the preliminary accounts necessary for such inquiries. (shrink)

It is now common to explain some of incidental perception’s features by means of a different capacity, called phantasia. Phantasia, usually translated as ‘imagination,’ is thought to explain how incidental perception can be false and representational by being a constitutive part of perception. Through a close reading of De Anima 3.3, 428b10–29a9, I argue against this and for perception first: phantasia is always a product of perception, from which it initially inherits all its characteristics. No feature of perception is explained (...) directly by phantasia, and phantasia is never a part of perception. Phantasia is not imagination or representation, as many have thought, but perception-like appearance. Aristotle thus recognizes alongside three different types of perception three different types of perception-like appearance. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess the credibility of the legitimation thesis; the claim that the development of experimental science involved a legitimation of certain aspects of artisanal practice or craft knowledge. My goal will be to provide a critique of this idea by examining Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘mechanical history’ and the influence it exerted on attempts by later generations of scholars to appropriate the knowledge of craft traditions. Specifically, I aim to show how such projects were often premised upon (...) socio-epistemological ideals that served to reinforce, rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers. It will be my claim that a closer examination of the presuppositions underlying attempts by early modern natural philosophers to appropriate craft knowledge reveals, not a desire to legitimize aspects of artisanal practice, but rather strategies aimed at demonstrating the inferiority of the local ways of knowing upon which it was based. (shrink)

Aristotle claims that "although we perceive particulars, perception is of universals; for instance of human being, not of Callias-the-human-being" (APo II.19 100a16-b1). I offer an interpretation of this claim and examine its significance in Aristotle's epistemology.

In this article, I foreground the physiology of phantasia in Aristotle, which has been comparatively understudied. In the first section, I offer a new interpretation of the relationship between aisthēmata and phantasmata, based on passages in the De Anima and the Parva Naturalia, and for a nuanced understanding of their respective substrates in the body, which I argue to be connate pneuma and blood. In the second section, I draw out the ramifications of this physiological presence of phantasmata in the (...) blood and compare the integration of phantasmata into a person or animal’s experiential history with the process of digestion. Both processes, I contend, require internalization of foreign elements as well as their optimal organization; more strikingly, both processes occur in the same substance, in the same location, and, perhaps, at the same time. (shrink)