Lecture 1 - Plato, Aristotle, Bacon Flashcards
What are the similarities and differences between Plato and Aristotle with regard to techne and episteme?
Plato and Socrates both have distinction between craft knowledge and knowledge of the good
life. Plato values knowledge of good life higher than craft knowledge. Aristotle makes just as strong a distinction. However, Aristotle argues that the distinction between practical-technical artistic understanding and scientific-philosophical understanding cannot be a distinction involving possession of two kinds of “theories.” Plato’s Socrates appears to claim that moral virtue is a kind of knowledge; but this, counters Aristotle, must be wrong. Too obviously, it is possible to have knowledge of what to do but fail to do it. For Aristotle, moral virtue must therefore be conceived as a kind of practical reasoning (phronesis). Aristotle also refutes Plato’s need to overuse mathematical imagery in politics, for different disciplines need different degrees of exactness.
Connect induction and deduction to plato and aristotle
Plato: deduction, absolute ideas
Aristotle: induction
Implications plato’s republic
- Centrality of seeing and light: not just metaphors but actual properties
- Belief in essences and eternal truths (ideas and forms)
- Centrality of the absolute, abstract knowledge – mathematics (not for purpose of trading, but for knowing), never attach numbers to visible or tangible bodies
Episteme plato
- Knowledge of the good is the highest knowledge and the hardest to attain
- When you see it, you know that it is the cause of all good and beautiful things
- If you don’t think this, you don’t see it
The essence of being a good ruler (Plato)
Distinguishing between truth and simulacrum
Dialectics (plato)
doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first principle, in order to proceed to the one, the true and the good
Five ways soul grasps truth (Aristotle)
- Episteme: Universal Truths Through Deduction
- Techne: produces a specific truth (as opposed to Plato who says that impermanent things cannot be truth)
- Phronesis: Action (difference from production because action has no end beyond it), Doing Good and Evil
- Nous: Universal Truths Through Induction
- Sophia: episteme + nous, most important because with knowledge of the universal the individual can be understood
Knowledge and experience (Aristotle)
- Several memories make experience
- Experience seems like techne, but techne comes to man through experience
- Many experiences form one universal judgement from which objects are produced, this process is techne (so not experience itself)
Francis Bacon
- Aim: to refound human knowledge on the basis of a systematic methodology for scientific inquiry
- His ambitions were institutional, thinking of science as a social activity
- Providing an overall framework for the reclassification of the sciences: inductive structure for the study of nature
- Following the senses: not strictly as in empirism, but finding the common in all experiences through the mind, pathway from senses to mind
- Scientific method operates through reproducibility (verification)
- New Organum: to interrogate nature by experiments in order to tabulate the various circumstances of the phenomena under investigation and their circumstance
Interpretation of nature as science productive of works: (Bacon)
- Nature can not be conquered but by obeying her
- Science also must be known by works. It is by the witness of works, rather than by logic or even observation, that truth is revealed and established.
Physis
Matter
Episteme
Plato: Knowledge (science of knowledge)
Aristotle: Universal Truths Through Deduction
Phronesis
Action (difference from production because action has no end beyond it), Doing Good and Evil
Nous
Universal Truths Through Induction
Sophia
episteme + nous, most important because with knowledge of the universal the individual can be understood
