Ancient philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 1 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) 188

EPISTEMOLOGY truths Each of these parts has its proper arete: wisdom for the former and understanding for the latter Other intellectual virtues turn out to be parts of either phronesis or sophia: sophia, for instance, consists of nous plus episteme (7 1141b3–4) Sophia, Aristotle tells us, has as its subject matter divine, honourable, and useless things: it is what was practised by famous philosophers such as Thales and Anaxagoras What nous is, is not immediately clear: it is a word often used for the whole human intellectual apparatus, for the cognitive as opposed to the aVective part of the mind (cf 1139a17, 1139b5) Here, however, it appears to mean insight into the Wrst principles of theoretical science: the understanding of unproven necessary truths which is the basis of episteme (6 1140b31–41a9) It is this which, in conjunction with episteme, constitutes sophia, the highest human intellectual achievement The Ethics does not spell out what is involved in episteme or science That is laid out, explicitly and at length, in the Wrst six chapters of Posterior Analytics Aristotle accepts that to know something is the case is to be genuinely acquainted with the explanation of its being the case and to be aware that it cannot be otherwise If that is what knowledge is, Aristotle says, ‘It is necessary for demonstrative knowledge to depend on things that are true and primitive and immediate and better known than the conclusion, to which they must also be prior and of which they must be explanatory’ (APo 70a20–2) A body of scientiWc knowledge is built up out of demonstrations A demonstration is a particular kind of syllogism: one whose premisses can be traced back to principles that are true, necessary, universal, and immediately intuited These Wrst, self-evident principles are related to the conclusions of science as axioms to theorems There is an unsolved problem about the account of science in the Posterior Analytics: it bears no resemblance to the substantial corpus of Aristotle’s own scientiWc works Generations of scholars have tried in vain to Wnd in his writings a single instance of a demonstrative syllogism To be sure, the Posterior Analytics is not a treatise on scientiWc method, but a set of guidelines for scientiWc exposition.4 But Aristotle’s treatises are themselves expository, not methodological, and they not even approximate to the pattern of the Posterior Analytics See J Barnes, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration’, in J Barnes, M SchoWeld, and R Sorabji (eds.), Articles on Aristotle, i: Science (London: Duckworth, 1975) 165