----- Original Message -----
From: "gary C. moore" <simplicius@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <gottlos75@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <gottlos752004@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 3:35 AM
Subject: POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Book II Beta, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17
POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Book II Beta, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17
SECTION 2
GCM1: But Barnes concludes, "Aristotle . . . is whole-heartedly
Empiricist."
>
>ANTHONY2: Well, yes and no. Yes he is an empiricist in the sense that
he is clearly saying that universals are drawn from sensory experience,
but he is also not an empiricist because the universal that nous grasps
is not reducible to a conglomeration of associated sensory impressions
(as the empiricists held).
>
>GCM2 Revised: "Nous" as either "intuition or "comprehension" is an ability
or capacity "to do" something. "Nous" sees with judgment, krinein, as "AS"
or "not AS'. Johnathan Barnes mentions this:
1. "How, then can the gap between particulars and universals be jumped?
Aristotle's answer is that perception in fact gives us universals from
the start ( Post. Anal. Bk I, chap. 31, 87b29, notes). He means that we
perceive things as As; and that this so to speak, lodges the universal,
A, in our minds from the start-although we shall not, of course, have an
explicit or articulated understanding of A until we have advanced
[further]. It should be noted that this account is intended to hold for
ALL perceivers: it is not peculiar to human perception, nor does it
involve the intellect in any way. Even a fly sees an F." ([my italics-for
"F" see below]Barnes' commentary on 100a17)
ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: If you mean that sensation is 'implicitly' (i.e., non
explicitly) universal, then this is no different from the medieval
interpretation of Aristotle, nor from what I am saying. For example,
Aquinas comments on Aristotle that sensations are potentially
intelligible. So that would simply be what you call the 'traditional'
interpretation of Aristotle.
GARY C MOORE-4: First of all (I thought I had made it clear), you are
commenting upon Barnes' commentary. Secondly, whether one says
"explicitly" or "implicitly" sensation is intelligible is a mere contest
of empty words. Sensations are sensations, unless you are going to say
they are communicating secret messages to you. Of course, sensations can
never "explicitly" communicate universals to you. First of all that would
assume an external world outside your mind has already been proven to
exist, which has not happened. Second, that would assume that sensations
are intelligent beings able to "explicitly" communicate universals to
you. I do not think you mean either. Of course, it always has to be
"implicitly", and, unless you assume some form of communication, the
whole process has to be in the individual mind. And if it is in the
individual mind, universals have only two ways to logically exist -
either as innate ideas (which would mean you have another, other mind
within your mind since obviously they are not "my" ideas in any sense) or
imagined out of sensational elements and comparisons. There are no other
alternatives.
Barnes' notes on 87b29 refer to the phrase "even if perception is of what
is such and such" which he compares to another Aristotle statement:
2. "And similarly perception is affected by what has color or flavor or
sound-but not as each of them is called [or J. A. Smith: "not insofar as
each is what it is"] but as such and such" (An B 12, 424a21-4; cf. 6,
418a20-5; A Pst B 19, 100a15). When, e.g., I see the son of Diares, the
proper object of my perception is a colored thing of such and such a
shape. We see individuals incidentally [428a20-23]; i.e., to se a is to
see an F (where F is some sensible quality) which in fact is a. Thus
perception is, in a sense, 'of the universal'; and so (one might infer)
reports of perception may encapsulate knowledge. Aristotle rejects the
final inference, but his rejection relies upon a tenuous distinction
between having perception of X and perceiving X. His answer would be
something like this: 'Although a strictly correct reply to the question
"What are you perceiving?" must be of the form "an F" or perhaps "That
F" and cannot be of the form "a" (where "a" is a proper name),
nevertheless any proposition reporting the contents of your perception
must contain or imply some reference to individual objects, times, or
places; and this must be so because the act of perception is necessarily
tied to some individual time and place."
This seems essentially correct to me except the distinction between
prepositional knowledge, i.e., "reports of perception" and perception
itself is blurred. And the use of "understanding" at 87b29 seems
emphatically prepositional, i.e., "which we say is universal'. What I am
so clumsily trying to do is state the 'most obvious' yet least noted: All
knowledge must come from perception including the making actual of what
was unknown and only potential in the capacities of 'intuition' which
merely changes the aspect of an undifferentiated sense impression into a
differentiated sense impression attracting special attention and thus
becoming a "universal'.
ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: I don't think for Aristotle, intuition (or nous)
"merely changes the aspect of an undifferentiated sense impression into a
differentiated sense impression." That's clear just from Posterior
Analytics.19, because he explicitly says that all animals have sensation
(and therefore the ability to differentiate them - else sensation would
be useless), but not that all animals have intuition
GARY C MOORE-4: If nous as intuition merely compares sensations and
imagines a fallible likeness that may well change with future experience,
then this is merely a physiological "capacity". If it takes raw sense
impressions, compares them, and imagines a likeness, this "likeness" must
be tested for self-consistency in further sense experience. As one
species of animal physiologically differs from another species of animal,
and each has their own function and niche for living through their
physiological features and therefore different abilities (therefore we do
not have to 'assume' different physiological intellectual capacities
'within' their 'minds' which we can know nothing about except through
purely external observation), so "intuition" is going to function in a
different fashion for each of them. For instance, a snake is not going to
be intuiting in terms of "grasping" as in "hexein". And since I am just
saying that intuition is simply an ability to compare sensations and
imagine a common denominator that might "work" or not "work" in practice,
this might well be due to the simian feature of having hands and
comparing what is in the left hand with what is in the right hand, to be
simplistic, and one sees this is 'like' or 'unlike' that, i.e "the
ability to differentiate them - else sensation would be useless" as you
said. All intuition is, is the manipulation, as "AS" with hands, of
sensation or perception.
"Nous" puts sensations together that fit together. It puts apple with
apple instead of apple with horse. It is "reducible", or better,
"grounded" as Aristotle is describing the creation of a universal from
sense impressions "taking a stand" and uniting through the capacity to
recognize likeness through memory. Aristotle calls this "accounting."
ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: Not just any likenesses, but specifically universals.
Remember that for Aristotle, all animals have sensations (and therefore
can perceive likenesses and differences among them), but not all animals
have nous.
GARY C MOORE-4: Likeness ARE universals. They going through a process of
testing from being initially imagined as "primitive universals", the
likeness first notice as "unique" and therefore a "type" to be compared
to other experience that is then criticized as to its "likeness" fitting
the experience of similar perceptions and seeing if the likeness is
consistent with further experience. Saying "not all animals have nous" is
an unverifiable and ambiguous statement even for Aristotle. As far as
Aristotle can tell, an animal only "seems" not to have nous or "sweems"
not to have memory because of observation of behavior. Since we cannot
know the internal mental workings of an animal, being as each species is
of a different physiological shape and therefore different function and
niche in living, I can simply say, as far as I know, the comparison of
likenesses is done in a completely different fashion which, of course,
would have to be the case if a species did not have comparable right and
left hands.
ANTHONY-3: The recognition of the universal (nous) may depend on
sensations and memory, but that doesn't imply that it is *reducible* to
sensation and memory.
GCM3: No, not as the irreducible elements of a naked, undifferentiated
sense impression without imagination and feeling and temporality (if that
can even happen in reality-the existence of such is essentially
theoretical, a construction of the history of thinking, an "always
already" fictitious enterprise).
ANTHONTY CRIFASI-4: Saying that an impression must be accompanied with
imagination, feeling, and temporality is different from saying that it
must be accompanied by 'universality' (by the recognition of universality
in nous). Aristotle may have held that sensation must be accompanied by
the former, but not the latter.
GARY C MOORE-4: I don't seem to remember saying, "accompanied". Saying
that an impression is differentiated, made into a uniqueness that gains
one's attention because it is painful or tastes good, etc., and
therefore, as a "type" becoming comparable to other impressions to
present a likeness, is simply differentiating from the undifferentiated.
The sensation of pain emphatically does this. It catches your attention
and impulsively you look for a 'this' as cause. You have an "impression",
you have "imagination, feeling, and temporality", and you compare the
situation to other situations possibility like it, very likely
instantaneously because very few situations will be equally emphatic and
similar. "Likeness" is sufficient for the meaning of "universality". You
don't need anything more. "likeness" is the simplest term covering the
result of the whole process according to Ockham's razor. The use of
"universal" as something more or other than simple "likeness" either
needs much more explanation to justify it, as well as calling intuition
"nous" as if something more than simple perception and comparison were
implied, or it is a mystical apparition. I do not think Aristotle really
implied a "more" than experience and its interpretation through
comparison.
To a certain extent this is a pseudo-problem of "Is the glass half full
or half-empty?" One does not "reduce" or "descend" to "sensation and
memory", one starts with them as fundamental, and necessarily they are
always at hand and always primarily in view as validating what one says.
Or, introducing 'primitive' morality, should be. They are the primordial
standard to judge by. But it is HOW it remains "at hand" constantly (or
"eternally" or, better, "ever present") OR "always and everywhere" that
is at question. Because in some sense the universal must have a topos, a
place! It must exist somewhere! Someone must have the idea!
ANTHONY CRIFASI-4: According to Aristotle, there doesn't have to be a
universal at all for there to be sensation and memory, since he says that
more animals have sensation and memory than have nous.
GARY C MOORE-4: What possible use, then, would there be for memory if
there was no comparison? I can reasonably conceive a greater or lesser
ability of comparison as well as a greater and lesser ability of memory -
of which Aristotle says some animals have none - but I find the later is
nonsense, and the having of memory but not the ability at any level
whatsoever to compare experience remembered, even if Aristotle or anyone
else said it, nonsense. Even for a planarian, this would very quickly
lead to extinction. But it has been experimentally demonstrated that a
planarian can learn to avoid painful experiences. Therefore a planarian
MUST have memory and it MUST use that memory to compare experiences.
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