Demonstrative Knowledge and Epistemic Continuity in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics
This dissertation challenges the axiomatic deductive interpretation of demonstrative knowledge (hê apodeitikê epistêmê) in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, which was dominant in the last century. According to the interpretation, the treatise is thought to hold to an ideal structure of scientific knowledge consisting in a system of axiomatic deductive knowledge: this system has a finite set of basic and necessary propositions as axioms or principles and takes syllogism as its formal language. The net effect of this interpretation is to cast Aristotle's philosophy of science in hypothetico-deductive terms and thus to eclipse Aristotle's theory of demonstration in the overall interpretation of his philosophical and scientific method. This dissertation offers a deflationary account of the axiomatic interpretation by rediscovering the role of the principles (archê) of demonstrative sciences within the epistemic process of demonstrative investigation. The dissertation provides a unified vision of demonstrative knowledge in the two books of the Posterior Analytics taken together. According to the alternative model offered in the dissertation, the nucleus of demonstrative knowledge consists in the epistemic processes of mediating between knowledge of facts and knowledge of causes. Unlike the deduction from axioms, demonstrative knowledge on this view is not a one-directional procedure from principles to theorems as conclusions. Rather, it consists of both understanding concrete facts from causes and understanding causes from the concrete without vicious circularity. Within Aristotle's framework for science, the contexts of epistêmê and nous are not sharply separated from each other, a point of contrast to the axiomatic interpretation. For Aristotle, searching for causes and explaining from them are sometimes concurrent, and not always linear, processes. Chapters 1 and 2 treat two principles of demonstrative science, hypothesis and definition. The Chapters loosen the rigid understanding of principles of Aristotelian science as they are interpreted by the axiomatic-deductive model, and then recover the role of principles within the movement of demonstrative reasoning. Chapter 3 explores the dynamism of demonstrative knowledge, which is a continual epistemic process that brings the reasoner closer to the essences of entities in the empirical world, even though some fallibility may remain within the process. Chapter 4 seeks the epistemic ground of demonstrative knowledge itself: in the first and last chapters of the treatise, Aristotle presents that human cognitions from perception to nous are continuously conjoined in their signifying essences, a view that contrasts with Plato's epistemic discontinuity.
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