PHI 2323 Lecture 10

« previous | Friday, September 20, 2019 | next »

Aristotle. De Anima

Knowledge is good and honorable
What about knowledge of evil?
- Some knowledge is not as worthwhile
- Knowledge can be a means to bring about other knowledge
  - For example: the servile arts (plumbing, farming, etc.)
- Knowledge can also be an end (i.e., good in itself)
  - Aristotle prefers this type of knowledge (more honorable)
  - For example: biology, natural philosophy, theoretical mathematics
Knowledge consists of an object and a mode
- object is the thing being studied (what makes it more or less honorable/worthwhile)
- mode is the quality of knowledge (what makes it more or less certain)

The soul is the "principle of life" … let's talk about life.
We live: we experience senses, feeling, and knowledge
We have two views of ourselves: inside and outside
- some say the inner is reducible to the outer view
  - Everything one could know about a person's soul is observable from the outside
  - sounds like something Papineau might say
  - this is not true
- Inside view is essential (well, both are essential due to overlap, but inside carries more weight)
  - Our ability to recognize the following nonsense as logically sound can only arise from our inside view:
    - all men are cows, all cows are purple, therefore all men are purple
    - logical inference is an interior quality
  - The inside view is how we know life best
    - we know more about ourselves than we do about others
    - we know innately whether we are alive, but we have to rely on our senses to determine if someone else is alive (if someone is unconscious on the ground, this may be harder to determine)
Aristotle's goal in De Anima is to demonstrate that the soul is immortal and immaterial