Abstract
This paper presents Aristotle’s method of understanding the first principles of natural things in the Physics I.1 and analyzes the three stages of which this method consists. In the Physics I.1, Aristotle suggests that the natural proper route which one has to follow in order to find out the first principles of natural things is to proceed from what is clearer and more knowable to us to what is more knowable and clear by nature. In the Physics I.1, the terms καθόλου (universal) and καθ΄ ἕκαστα (particular) are not used in their usual meaning (e.g., the meaning which the same terms have in the Posterior Analytics I. 2). This paper examines the Physics I.1 in comparison with the Posterior Analytics II. 19 in order to elucidate the meaning of καθόλου in the first chapter of Aristotle’s Physics. Furthermore, it reaches the conclusion that the structure of the natural world to which we belong determines the structure and the form of our knowledge. On the one hand, natural things are composite and, on the other hand, perception is involved in the initial grasping of natural things as composites. Thus, since perceptual knowledge is more accessible to us than any other kind of knowledge it is natural to reach knowledge of simple things, i.e., of the principles, starting our inquiry with the composites.
Highlights
In the opening chapter of the Physics, it is from a common assumption that Aristotle makes his beginning: “since knowledge and understanding or knowledge and scientific knowledge come about in all the disciplines that have principles or causes or elements from knowing these principles or causes or elements, for it is that we think that we know each thing, when we have identified the primary causes and the first principles and as far as the elements, it is clear that for natural science we should try to define firstly the matters concerning the principles”
According to Philoponus, Aristotle omits the conclusion, which would be “ natural theory becomes known when its principles are known”; he gives the consequence of this, namely that since natural theory or natural science becomes known when its principles are known, we should try to define the principles of natural theory or natural science
Regarding this cognitive process, Horstschäfer mentions the words of W
Summary
The terminology which Aristotle uses in the opening passage of the Physics (184 a 10–16) is applied very carefully in order to show that each term represents a different way of coming to know the principles, these ways are complementary to one another and not incompatible. The fact that Aristotle uses εἰδέναι as prior to ἐπίστασθαι in this passage prepares the ground for the prominent role of perception in the empirical method of inquiry into the principles of natural things which will be presented shortly after. Philoponus[18] suggests that Aristotle is either using “principles” and “causes” in parallel to mean the same thing, so that he is saying that both the efficient and the final are principles and causes, but he calls the other two (the material and the formal) “elements”, or, alternatively, a) he predicates the first term, “principle”, of all in them in common, since. Even if Aristotle in this passage refers to all the causes calling them “principles”,19 he is trying to display the principles of natural things as elements of them, i.e. he intends to show those principles of natural things which inhere in them as elements of them. Privation is a principle of coming to be and passing away or a principle of change
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