musings about ancient philosophy

Since this is my first post after the Blogistikon hiatus, I’d like to thank Dhananjay for asking me to contribute. I’m really excited to be able to get some ideas out and hopefully readers will enjoy it too. I expect I will post mainly on epistemology and logic in Plato and Aristotle because my current work looks at how logic gets used in different contexts: dialectical encounters, analysis, epistemology and so on. I got interested in the puzzle I address in this post because Prior Analytics B21 is a bit of a quirky text where Aristotle relates logic to epistemology.

Sometimes we fail to know logical consequences of our knowledge or to believe logical consequences of our beliefs. I can know the axioms of arithmetic and set-theory, for example, but not know whether the Goldbach conjecture is true. B21 asks why this is. Aristotle compares his answer to ‘the argument in the Meno’ (cf. A. Po. A 1 71a17-b8) then says something puzzling:

For it never turns out that someone knows the individual (to kath’hekaston) in advance, but she gets knowledge of the particular  (ton kata meros) at the same time, by induction, just like those who are reminded. For sometimes we know directly, for example that <such-and-such> has two right-angles if we see that <such-and-such> is a triangle (Pr. An. B 21 67a21-26).

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