An Aristotelian Account of Induction
An Aristotelian Account of Induction

Author: Louis Groarke

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0773575766

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In An Aristotelian Account of Induction Groarke discusses the intellectual process through which we access the "first principles" of human thought - the most basic concepts, the laws of logic, the universal claims of science and metaphysics, and the deepest moral truths. Following Aristotle and others, Groarke situates the first stirrings of human understanding in a creative capacity for discernment that precedes knowledge, even logic. Relying on a new historical study of philosophical theories of inductive reasoning from Aristotle to the twenty-first century, Groarke explains how Aristotle offers a viable solution to the so-called problem of induction, while offering new contributions to contemporary accounts of reasoning and argument and challenging the conventional wisdom about induction.

An Aristotelian Account of Induction
An Aristotelian Account of Induction

Author: Louis Groarke

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0773535950

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Through a study of argument, science, art, and human intelligence, Louis Groarke explores and builds on a line of Aristotelian thought that traces the origins of logic and knowledge to a mental creativity that is able to leap to insightful and truthful conclusions on the basis of restricted evidence. In an Aristotelian Account of Induction Groarke discusses the intellectual process through which we access the "first principles" of human thought - the most basic concepts, The laws of logic, The universal claims of science and metaphysics, And The deepest moral truths. Following Aristotle and others, Groarke situates the first stirrings of human understanding in a creative capacity for discernment that precedes knowledge, even logic. Relying on a new historical study of philosophical theories of inductive reasoning from Aristotle To The twenty-first century, Groarke explains how Aristotle offers a viable solution To The so-called problem of induction, while offering new contributions to contemporary accounts of reasoning and argument and challenging the conventional wisdom about induction. In recovering and developing philosophical ideas that have been largely overlooked or misrepresented by more recent sources, An Aristotelian Account of Induction makes a major contribution To The historical study of philosophy and to critical debate.

Aristotle's Theory of Abstraction
Aristotle's Theory of Abstraction

Author: Allan Bäck

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-07-02

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 3319047590

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This book investigates Aristotle’s views on abstraction and explores how he uses it. In this work, the author follows Aristotle in focusing on the scientific detail first and then approaches the metaphysical claims, and so creates a reconstructed theory that explains many puzzles of Aristotle’s thought. Understanding the details of his theory of relations and abstraction further illuminates his theory of universals. Some of the features of Aristotle’s theory of abstraction developed in this book include: abstraction is a relation; perception and knowledge are types of abstraction; the objects generated by abstractions are relata which can serve as subjects in their own right, whereupon they can appear as items in other categories. The author goes on to look at how Aristotle distinguishes the concrete from the abstract paronym, how induction is a type of abstraction which typically moves from the perceived individuals to universals and how Aristotle’s metaphysical vocabulary is "relational.’ Beyond those features, this work also looks at how of universals, accidents, forms, causes and potentialities have being only as abstract aspects of individual substances. An individual substance is identical to its essence; the essence has universal features but is the singularity making the individual substance what it is. These theories are expounded within this book. One main attraction in working out the details of Aristotle’s views on abstraction lies in understanding his metaphysics of universals as abstract objects. This work reclaims past ground as the main philosophical tradition of abstraction has been ignored in recent times. It gives a modern version of the medieval doctrine of the threefold distinction of essence, made famous by the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.

Aristotle's First Principles
Aristotle's First Principles

Author: Terence Irwin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 0198242905

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Aristotle's reliance on dialectic as a method of philosophy appears to conflict with his metaphysical realist view of his conclusions. This book explores Aristotle's philosophical method and the merits of his conclusions, and shows how he defends dialectic against the objection that it cannot justify a metaphysical realist's claims. The author does not presuppose extensive previous acquaintance with Aristotle. Greek texts are translated, and Greek words transliterated.

Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology
Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology

Author: Jason W. Carter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1108574777

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This volume is the first in English to provide a full, systematic investigation into Aristotle's criticisms of earlier Greek theories of the soul from the perspective of his theory of scientific explanation. Some interpreters of the De Anima have seen Aristotle's criticisms of Presocratic, Platonic, and other views about the soul as unfair or dialectical, but Jason W. Carter argues that Aristotle's criticisms are in fact a justified attempt to test the adequacy of earlier theories in terms of the theory of scientific knowledge he advances in the Posterior Analytics. Carter proposes a new interpretation of Aristotle's confrontations with earlier psychology, showing how his reception of other Greek philosophers shaped his own hylomorphic psychology and led him to adopt a novel dualist theory of the soul–body relation. His book will be important for students and scholars of Aristotle, ancient Greek psychology, and the history of the mind–body problem.

Action, Contemplation, and Happiness
Action, Contemplation, and Happiness

Author: C. D. C. Reeve

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0674065476

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The notion of practical wisdom is one of Aristotle's greatest inventions. It has inspired philosophers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Thompson, and John McDowell. Now a leading scholar of ancient philosophy offers a challenge to received accounts of practical wisdom by situating it in the larger context of Aristotle's views on knowledge and reality. That happiness is the end pursued by practical wisdom is commonly agreed. What is disputed is whether happiness is to be found in the practical life of political action, in which we exhibit courage, temperance, and other virtues of character, or in the contemplative life, where theoretical wisdom is the essential virtue. C. D. C. Reeve argues that the dichotomy is bogus, that these lives are in fact parts of a single life, which is the best human one. In support of this view, he develops innovative accounts of many of the central notions in Aristotle's metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology, including matter and form, scientific knowledge, dialectic, educatedness, perception, understanding, political science, practical truth, deliberation, and deliberate choice. These accounts are based directly on freshly translated passages from many of Aristotle's writings. Action, Contemplation, and Happiness is an accessible essay not just on practical wisdom but on Aristotle's philosophy as a whole.

The Development of Dialectic from Plato to Aristotle
The Development of Dialectic from Plato to Aristotle

Author: Jakob Leth Fink

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1139789287

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The period from Plato's birth to Aristotle's death (427–322 BC) is one of the most influential and formative in the history of Western philosophy. The developments of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and science in this period have been investigated, controversies have arisen and many new theories have been produced. But this is the first book to give detailed scholarly attention to the development of dialectic during this decisive period. It includes chapters on topics such as: dialectic as interpersonal debate between a questioner and a respondent; dialectic and the dialogue form; dialectical methodology; the dialectical context of certain forms of arguments; the role of the respondent in guaranteeing good argument; dialectic and presentation of knowledge; the interrelations between written dialogues and spoken dialectic; and definition, induction and refutation from Plato to Aristotle. The book contributes to the history of philosophy and also to the contemporary debate about what philosophy is.

Analyses of Aristotle
Analyses of Aristotle

Author: Jaakko Hintikka

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-04-11

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1402020414

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Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light on our own conceptual presuppositions. This collection comprises several striking interpretations that Jaakko Hintikka has put forward over the years, constituting a challenge not only to Aristotelian scholars and historians of ideas, but to everyone interested in logic, epistemology or metaphysics and in their history.

The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism
The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism

Author: Marco Sgarbi

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9400749503

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Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the ‘great names’, but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field. ​