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Personal Details

Principal Investigator: A. Raghuramaraju Department of Philosophy, University

of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator P. R. Bhatt Department of Humanities & Social

Sciences, IIT Bombay

Content Writer John Russon Department of Philosophy, University

of Guelph, Canada

Content Reviewer Former Professor, Department of

T. K. Nizar Ahmed
Philosophy, SSUS Kalady

Language Editor Chitralekha Manohar Freelancer, Chennai

Description of Module

Paper Name Philosophy

Subject Name Epistemology I

Module Name/Title Epistemology in Aristotle

Module Id 2.23

Pre-requisites

Objectives To introduce students to the core texts and ideas of Aristotle’s

epistemology.

Keywords epistemological naturalism; empiricism; holism; Aristotelian

epistemology; the four causes; insight
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Aristotle’s Epistemology
Introduction

Aristotle (384–322 BC) initially came to Athens from Macedon to study under Plato, and subsequently,
went on to found his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. Though the works of Aristotle that we
possess today take the form of coherent, organised treatises, it is generally believed that they are notes
from his lectures, possibly recorded by his students. We cannot, therefore, assume that all of the
Aristotelian texts perfectly reflect Aristotle’s view or that every passage will fit seamlessly with every
other: despite the broad and systematic unity of Aristotle’s writings, we still must be careful in
interpreting his texts, and we typically have to look for an overarching, unifying perspective that is
nowhere explicitly articulated. This is especially the case with regard to Aristotle’s epistemology, since he
did not write a separate treatise devoted to knowledge. To distil an epistemology from Aristotle’s texts,
one must synthesise his discussions of understanding, sensation, learning and mind, while maintaining a
focus on the broad philosophical orientation that shapes them all: overall, Aristotle’s philosophical
approach to knowledge is naturalistic, holistic and empiricist.

Giving an Account: Naturalism and Form

The foundation of Aristotle’s approach to knowledge is found at the beginning of his Metaphysics, where
he observes that “all human beings by nature strive towards knowing” (Barnes [1984], p. 1552). This is
the naturalism of Aristotle’s epistemology: human beings are a particular kind of natural being, and to
understand knowledge, we must understand it within this context of the natural capacities of organisms.
In his work, On the Soul, Aristotle notes that, like plants and animals (and unlike inorganic natural bodies
such as earth and water), we are living beings that engage in self-nutrition, growth and reproduction. Like
animals (and unlike plants), we have sensory awareness and we move ourselves in space. But, unlike any
other natural being, human beings also have the capacity to grasp reality intellectually and to
communicate that understanding to each other through meaningful speech. It is these distinctive capacities
that Aristotle identifies when he defines the human being, in Politics, Book I, Chapter 2, as “the animal
having logos” (Barnes [1984], p. 1988), a phrase that has sometimes been misleadingly translated as “the
rational animal”, but that is more accurately translated as “the animal that can give an account”.

Analogously to the way in which a plant turns towards the sunlight or a tiger chases a deer, then, human
beings are naturally drawn towards being able to account for things: towards understanding “why” about
everything. To understand a thing is precisely to move beyond its immediate sensory form and to
apprehend intellectually those unchanging, defining features of its being that are responsible for its
dynamic, bodily reality. Like other animals, we apprehend the sensible forms of things, but, because of
the presence of mind (nous) within us, we have the capacity to recognise the intelligible forms of things in
and through our apprehension their sensible forms.

In Metaphysics, Book I Chapter 1, and also in Posterior Analytics, Book II Chapter 19, Aristotle
describes the experiential process involved in coming to understand something. Aristotle calls this
process “epagogē”, which is sometimes translated as “induction”, but might better be translated simply as
“learning”. Basically, our senses give us access to things, and through our ongoing practical engagement
with those things, we become habituated to interacting with them in a meaningful way: we develop
“experience” (empeiria) with those things. Once we have thus become practically familiar with things, we
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are in a position to grasp their principles (archai) explicitly: to understand them. These passages are
essential to understanding the distinctive, empiricist nature of Aristotle’s epistemology.

Like other animals, we have perception (aisthēsis), that is, our bodies are characterised by sensory organs
that allow us to be aware of things outside us. In On the Soul, Book II, Chapters 5–12, Aristotle studies
the distinctive nature of the senses. The different senses – vision, hearing, touch and so on – are each
responsive to a distinctive aspect of things (colour, texture, sound and so on), which Aristotle calls the
“special sensible” of the sense, and there are also aspects of things (such as shape and motion) that are
apprehended by more than one sense. In On the Soul, Book III, Chapters 1–2, Aristotle notes, however,
that, though vision, for example, can apprehend a white colour and touch, for example, can apprehend a
hard texture, the perceiving organism can also recognise that the white colour and hard texture belong to
the same thing; this indicates, Aristotle argues, that these individual senses do not operate in
independence of each other, but that they are themselves the differentiated aspects of a more basic,
“common” power of sensing: it is the organism as a whole that senses through each of the individual
sensory powers. Unlike British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, with whom we associate
the understanding of sensation as a mechanical matter of being impacted by discrete sensory data,
Aristotle, like contemporary ecological and phenomenological epistemologists such as James J. Gibson,
John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, understands perception to be an organic matter of an animal’s
apprehension of a total, meaningful form. 1

This notion from On the Soul that we perceive form corresponds closely to Aristotle’s notion of empeiria,
“being experienced”, in Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 1. In our everyday experience, we recognise that,
through our ongoing practical engagements with things, we gradually become familiar with them. In such
contexts, we find that, even without explicit theoretical study, we tend to develop a “feel” for things, and
we grasp the “sense” of what they are and how to deal with them. A person who works with goats, for
example, comes to “know” the nature of goats – she becomes “fluent”, so to speak, in her dealings with
goats – and this knowledge is reflected both in her ability to get from the goats the behaviour she desires
and in her ability to care for them effectively, that is, to respond to their needs. What such situations of
empeiria remind us of is that our bodily, sensory engagement with things is typically not a matter of
detached observation, but is a matter of practical engagement, and, further, that this bodily, sensory
engagement is meaningful: within this bodily, sensory engagement, the nature of things is implicitly
revealed. Understanding proper, then – what Aristotle in Metaphysics Book I Chapter 1 calls craft
(technē) or science (epistēmē) – is thus a matter of grasping explicitly this sense that already implicitly
animates our perceptual engagement. Posterior Analytics, Book II, Chapter 19 adds that coming to such
an understanding is something we typically experience as a kind of enlightenment: we suddenly “get it”,
and in a moment of intellectual insight (noēsis), we directly intuit the nature of the thing.

Understanding the Cause: Holistic Empiricism

This grasp of the intelligible form is what ultimately allows us to answer the question “Why?” about that
which we perceive. Aristotle maintains that the question “Why?” can be answered in four ways, and the
grasp of the intelligible form of the thing can be translated into an identification of the four “causes”
(aitiai) of the thing in question: its “formal”, “final”, “material” and “moving” causes.

1
For an introduction to these contemporary approaches, see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Phenomenology and the
Sciences of Man, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Compare John Russon, “Aristotle’s Animative
Epistemology,” Idealistic Studies 25 (1995): 241-53.
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In everyday experience, we distinguish between the unchanging identity of the individual substance and
its changing states. Indeed, the most distinctive mark of an individual substance, Aristotle remarks in
Categories, Chapter 5 (Barnes [1984], p. 7), is precisely this fact that it remains the same despite
changing between contrary qualities. As a tree frog grows from a tadpole to its mature form, for example,
we recognise that it is the same individual, even though its size, its shape, its colour and its specific
behaviours, all change. The growing frog changes from small to large, and even the fully grown tree frog
can change its colour from green to red to white to black, and change its behaviour from waking to
sleeping. In this sense, we recognise the unchanging “what-ness” of the individual in and through the
changing ways in which that “what” is realised. Aristotle refers to this in Physics, Book II, Chapter 3
(Barnes [1984], pp 332-3) as the “what it is” (to ti esti) of the thing, and later scholars often refer to this as
the “formal cause” or the “essence”.2

This defining “whatness” of the thing is never simply reducible to any single bodily state of individual –
that is, the horse is just as much “itself” as a young colt and as a full-grown stallion – but it is,
nonetheless, true that the identity “horse” is only realised as a distinctive type of body: the fact of being a
horse only occurs in and as the specific context of horse anatomy. Said otherwise, the living being is an
organism: a system of organs by which and as which that distinctive form of life is realised. Thus,
corresponding to the “what it is” or the “formal cause” of a natural substance is a distinctive bodily
arrangement or what Aristotle calls the “that out of which” (to ex hou) – the so-called “material cause” of
the organism.

And, indeed, though the horse is as much “itself” as a young colt and as a young stallion, we recognise
nonetheless that it is the inherent nature of the horse to grow from being a colt to being a stallion. When
the colt grows, in other words, its development is not arbitrary, but is the fulfilment of its nature. In this
sense, the mature, adult form of the horse is the immanent goal of the horse’s development; it is the
actualisation of its defining potentiality. Aristotle refers to this finished state that completes the
organism’s development as the “that for the sake of which” (to hou heneka) or the “final cause” of its
activity.

Finally, we can recognise that organisms do not have any self-conscious plan to develop themselves to
their natural completion. Rather, what we mean by calling them “natural” is that, by acting on their
natural desires, they will automatically accomplish their own proper development, provided nothing
hinders them. Each natural organism, that is, is naturally oriented towards wanting to do the sorts of
things that will propel its development. Aristotle calls the organism’s natural desire to do what it needs to
do the “first cause of motion in the thing” (hē archē tēs metabolēs hē prōtē) or the “moving cause”.

Aristotle maintains, in the Posterior Analytics, Book I, Chapter 13 (Barnes [1984], p. 127), that we only
truly know when we have moved from the “that it is” (hoti) to the “why it is” (dioti), and it is in the
apprehension of the thing in terms of these “moving”, “material”, “formal” and “final” causes that we
truly apprehend that which we encounter: to know the thing is to apprehend its immediate, changing state
as the presence of these deeper causal realities. In identifying these four causes, Aristotle is thus drawing
our attention to the way in which the reality of the natural thing is not reducible simply to its immediately
existing state. On the contrary, the immediately existing state of the thing is only seen for what it is when
it is seen in the context of its defining form (morphē or eidos) and its developmental goal (telos). Equally,
Aristotle’s analysis aims to show that those defining (formal and final) realities, in turn, exist only in and

2
In On the Soul, Book II, Chapter 1, Aristotle also refers to the “what it is” of a living being as its “soul” [psuchē],
(Barnes [1984], pp 656-7).
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as the immediate bodily organisation and the immediate drives and desires (the material and moving
causes) of the existing thing. That knowledge is defined by the apprehension of these four causes thus
reveals simultaneously the inherently empirical and the essentially holistic nature of Aristotle’s
epistemology: the focus on the material and moving causes emphasises that knowledge must be rooted in
the specific actualities that are immediately present to us in experience, while the focus on the formal and
final causes emphasises that we will only grasp these features when we recognise them as integrated
together with and defined by larger contexts.

Aristotle’s Method and Scepticism

This notion that we have been exploring, that knowledge must begin from the immediately present
actuality but will end in apprehension of a whole understood as organised by a formal or final cause,
corresponds exactly to the distinctive method Aristotle himself employs in his major philosophical
treatises. In his work, On the Heavens, Book I, Chapter 3, (Barnes [1984], p. 450), and again in
Metaphysics, Book XII (Λ), Chapter 8, (Barnes [1984], p. 1697), Aristotle indicates that it is the
responsibility of knowledge “to account for the phenomena” [apodōsein ta phainomena] 3, and in the
Topics, Book I, Chapters 1–2, (Barnes [1984], pp 167-8), Aristotle writes that the proper route for
scientific study (which he there calls “dialectic”) is to move from the “received views” (endoxa)
regarding any aspect of reality – “the things that appear to all or to the many or to the wise” – to the
defining principles (archai) of that reality. In his own philosophical investigations (of nature, of the soul,
of politics, of being as such), Aristotle’s procedure is, in each case, first to begin by assembling the
already existent philosophical views on the subject he is investigating. He then looks for a systematic
integration of these views, to see how they are meaningful attempts to make sense of a single
phenomenon. Sorting out the organisation of these views typically amounts to a clarification and an
articulation of the inherent nature of the subject under investigation and this integrating of the received
views typically affords the essential insight into the “causes” of the phenomenon in question.

Later scholars have sometimes accused Aristotle of not treating epistemological scepticism – the view
that knowledge of reality is impossible – as a serious issue. Indeed, though the sceptical movement in
philosophy was already alive in Aristotle’s time, his own discussions of scepticism, such as in Posterior
Analytics, Book I, Chapter 3 and in Metaphysics Book IV (Γ), Chapters 4–6, are quite brief. Rather than
concluding that Aristotle does not treat scepticism seriously, though, it would be more accurate to say that
there is a very basic way in which Aristotle conceives of knowledge differently than do the sceptics.
Though there is a broad variety of views within the sceptical tradition, it has been common for both
ancient and modern sceptics to construe our experience as a self-enclosed domain and to construe
knowledge – or our attempts at knowledge – as a constructive operation we perform upon our more
immediate experience. This model of knowledge as essentially something “artificial” does not at all
correspond to Aristotle’s view, according to which, knowledge is more like something that blossoms
within the relation of knower and known. The model of epagogē described in Posterior Analytics, Book
II, Chapter 19, and Aristotle’s own method of studying the endoxa in order to intuit their immanent
rationality, both point to knowledge not as something “made” – not as something we “do” – but as
something that comes to us: something we receive. This sense of insight as something self-occurring and
something we receive as a gift corresponds closely to Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of mind (nous).

3
The closely related expression “to save the phenomena,” (sōzein ta phainomena), is from Simplicius’ commentary
on 'On the Heavens'.
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Mind and Insight

The ability to intuit the essence – the causes – of things is our experience of “mind”. In On the Soul,
Book III, Chapters 4–5, Aristotle studies the distinctive nature of the mind (nous) and intellectual
knowledge (noēsis). He argues that the mind is not so much our own power as it is a kind of illumination
that we experience ourselves as receiving. What is distinctive of human beings is not that we are minds,
but that we have access to the power of mind.

Aristotle argues (in On the Soul, Book III, Chapter 4) that mind could not be a property of the individual
person, because the individual always operates with a necessarily finite perspective, whereas it is the very
nature of mind to be able to apprehend truths that are unconditioned by perspective. More exactly, if the
mind were the power of a bodily organ, as vision is the power of the eye or grasping the power of the
hand, then, Aristotle argues, the limitations of the organ would set the limits of that power. The eye, for
example, occupies a specific spatial location, and thus, it can only see objects located where it itself is not.
Again, bodily senses are themselves vulnerable to the qualities they apprehend, as hearing, for example,
can be destroyed by too loud a sound, vision by too bright a light or touch by too hot a temperature. In
these ways, it is clear that the bodily character of the sense entails that it operates with a necessarily finite
perspective. The very nature of the mind, however, is that it apprehends things absolutely: universally and
infinitely. To grasp the “whatness” of a dog is precisely to see through its always limited, finite actuality
to its defining reality – a reality that precisely exceeds those finite limitations. In all of our experiences of
grasping the causes (aitiai) or principles (archai) of phenomena – in all of our experiences of insight
(noēsis) – we enjoy a perspective that exceeds the limits offered us by our senses. In this sense, then, the
power of mind exceeds any of the powers of our bodily organism, and thus, it cannot be a property of our
natural organism, but must be self-defined in independence of the body. Aristotle thus concludes that
mind is not “our own”, properly speaking, but is a power to which we have access.

Knowledge and Intellectual Virtue

As the opening of the Metaphysics makes clear, knowledge, in Aristotle’s interpretation, is most basically
to be understood as a practice through which we enact and fulfil our nature as human beings – as “animals
having logos”. But whereas other animals fulfil their nature “naturally”, so to speak – that is, a camel, in
engaging in its characteristic activities, will automatically grow up to be a mature camel – human beings
must themselves take action to fulfil their own nature. In Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter 1,
Aristotle argues that we do not “naturally” fulfil our nature, but instead, we must cultivate good habits in
order for our native potentials to be released and realised. The fulfilment of our nature as “animals having
logos” requires both cultivating our logos – our ability to “take account” as such – and cultivating our
animality so that it embodies our defining capacities of logos. Cultivating our animality is a matter of
developing habits of emotional response that are intelligently sensitive to the demands of behavioural
situations; Aristotle refers to this as “moral virtue” or “virtue of character” (ethikē aretē). Aristotle refers
to cultivating our logos as such as “intellectual virtue” or “excellence of thought” (dianoētikē aretē).
Though knowing is something that is natural to us, the ability to know well must be cultivated.

Craft (technē), science (epistēmē), wisdom (sophia) and prudence (phronēsis) are all “virtues” or
“excellences” (aretai) of our logos. Knowing, in all its various forms, in other words, is not a simple
matter of the deployment of an already established power. Instead, knowing is a matter of skilful practice,
a matter of learning how to harness the various cognitive powers in the soul and to develop them to a state
of excellent functioning. And this bringing of our cognitive powers to excellence – developing them to
situations in which they are excellent according to the norms internal to knowledge as such – is
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simultaneously a matter of making ourselves excellent. Indeed, Aristotle concludes his study of human
nature in the Nicomachean Ethics by arguing that it is precisely in the “contemplative life” (bios
thēoretikos) – life that attends to the whole range of our human needs, but that has knowing as its central
focus – that our nature is most perfectly fulfilled.

Conclusion

Knowledge, as Aristotle interprets it, is to be understood as intimately connected with the world of nature.
More specifically, it is to be understood as an essential and distinctive fulfilment of human nature, and as
the blossoming of the inherent attunement of the human soul to the rest of nature. This account of
knowing is naturalistic, holistic and empiricist. At the same time, Aristotle’s rigorous attention to the
form our experience actually takes reveals knowledge to depend on insight – on the “gift” of an
intellectual illumination that we receive, but that is not reducible to our natural condition.