As a Pirsigian originally, I’ve naturally seen Aristotle as part of the problem that systematising everything scientifically and logically has led inevitably to the dominance of science in the world of knowledge and applied knowledge in action. Extreme forms in that, say, anything seen as rhetorical is thus described pejoratively, or that seeing science as the only credible form of knowledge being a dogma known as scientism. It’s a no-brainer that Aristotle himself was obviously far more nuanced than that.
I’ve dipped into Aristotle often enough to follow-up the context of quotes by others, but I wouldn’t say I’d read more than 10% of Aristotle’s own writings. I’m familiar with his Organon, the systematic way he organises and categorises everything and every topic in the world, the lesson learned in the taxonomy of any number of ontologies since. Any given organon or ontology is or course “deemed”, it’s the consistent and comprehensive systematisation that represents the lasting pragmatic value. The fact that our post-Galilean word “science” derives from “scientia” is part of the problem too, that we’ve taken the term that signified knowledge of all kinds and turned it into the word for just the one kind.
The “best-available one-volume Aristotle” I have (~1500 pages) is “The Basic Works of Aristotle” constituted out of the definitive Oxford translations and in print as the Random House hard-back for over 80 years, as edited by Richard McKeon. He of course was the bogeyman, the professor or Chairman of the Ancient Greek philosophy course that Pirsig bumps up against in Chicago in his first book (ZMM). I have the 2001 Modern Library Classics paper-back version. As well as McKeon’s biographical notes on Aristotle and his original Preface to the whole volume, the 2001 edition includes an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve. Although thoroughly signposted by Aristotle in his own chapter and subject headings, there is sadly no alphabetical topic index in the individual books or the overall volume. Those 3 introductory sections by McKeon and Reeve are actually quite illuminating about what is or isn’t science in Aristotelian terms.
After labelling pretty much all of Aristotle’s topics as “sciences” theoretical, practical and productive – even theology, philosophy, ethics, arts and crafts (with rhetoric as one of those “arts”) – Reeve says this :
“Of these [sciences] the theoretical ones are the Aristotelian paradigm, since they provide us with knowledge of necessary universal truths. The extent to which ethics [and others] fit the paradigm is less clear. One reason for this is that a huge part of these [Ethics & Rhetoric] has to do [NOT] with universal principles of the sort one finds in physics, but with particular cases whose near infinite variety cannot easily be summed-up in formulae. [eg] The knowledge of what justice is may well be scientific knowledge, but to know what justice requires in a particular case one also needs equity, which is a combination of virtue and an eye [trained by experience]. Perhaps then we should think of the practical [and productive] sciences as having something like a theoretically scientific core, but as [NOT] being reducible to it.”
That latter sentence is pretty much the core of my own thesis these last 20+ years, even though I read it only yesterday. Fascinating.
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