David Bronstein - Böcker

'All teaching and all intellectual learning come to be from pre-existing knowledge.' So begins Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, one of the most important, and difficult, works in the history of western philosophy. David Bronstein sheds new light on this challenging text by arguing that it is coherently structured around two themes of enduring philosophical interest: knowledge and learning. The Posterior Analytics, on Bronstein's reading, is a sustained examination of scientific knowledge: what it is and how it is acquired. Aristotle first discusses two principal forms of scientific knowledge (epist?m? and nous). He then provides a compelling account, in reverse order, of the types of learning one needs to undertake in order to acquire them. The Posterior Analytics thus emerges as an elegantly organized work in which Aristotle describes the mind's ascent from sense-perception of particulars to scientific knowledge of first principles. Bronstein also highlights Plato's influence on Aristotle's text. For each type of learning Aristotle discusses, Bronstein uncovers an instance of Meno's Paradox (a puzzle from Plato's Meno according to which inquiry and learning are impossible) and a solution to it. In addition, he argues, against current orthodoxy, that Aristotle is committed to the Socratic Picture of inquiry, according to which one should seek what a thing's essence is before seeking its demonstrable attributes and their causes.Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning will be of interest to students and scholars of ancient philosophy, epistemology, or philosophy of science.

This volume provides a rich collection of original essays on Aristotle's metaphysics written by sixteen prominent scholars in the field. Honouring the seminal influence of David Charles to philosophical scholarship, it offers fresh interpretations and assessments of Aristotle's thinking in metaphysics and related areas such as philosophy of language, psychology, natural philosophy, and mathematics. The collection contributes to the recent resurgence of interest in Aristotelian metaphysics, furthering our understanding of Aristotle's seminal contribution to the history of western philosophy. It evaluates key features of Aristotle's metaphysical thinking: his accounts of definition and meaning; his understanding of being and the categories; his models of explanation, causation, and accounts of modality, space, and change. The chapters are written with clarity and attention to the detail of Aristotle's texts but presuppose no knowledge of ancient Greek and can be read with benefit by advanced philosophy students and scholars.

This volume brings together 12 essays exploring the history of theories of definition and essence in Western philosophy from Aristotle to Kant. Definition and essence have been central to philosophical theorising since antiquity and remain so to this day. This volume presents a series of explorations of key authors and themes connected by a common set of questions: What are definitions and essences? What are the connections between them? What are their logical and metaphysical properties? What sorts of things have definitions and essences and what sorts of things do not? What functions do definitions and essences serve in the physical, mathematical, and human sciences? How, if at all, can we come to know them? This volume shows that answering these questions allows us to see in a new light key figures and movements in the history of Western thought. The volume’s broad historical sweep also facilitates comparisons between different figures. And it reveals important connections between different subfields of philosophy as these were developed over the centuries – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and natural philosophy among them.Definition and Essence from Aristotle to Kant will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the history of philosophy, history of logic, history of mathematics, epistemology, and metaphysics.