Book review: David Bronstein, Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning: The Posterior Analytics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. (pp.xiii-272).

Breno Andrade Zuppolini

doi:10.1590/0100-6045.2017.v40n4.bz

Abstract

This is a review of David Bronstein's book Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning: The Posterior Analytics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Highlights

One of the main theses of the book is that inquiry, for Aristotle, follows a “Socratic Picture”, which can be divided into five stages: Stage 1: We do not know whether a subject S exists and we seek whether it exists
Stage 3: We know what S is, and we seek whether a predicate P belongs to it as one of its demonstrable attributes
We learn by induction preliminary accounts specifying the meaning of conceptual terms, so we can investigate whether or not they denote existing kinds (APo II 19 and Bronstein’s Chapter 13)

Summary

Introduction

One of the main theses of the book is that inquiry, for Aristotle, follows a “Socratic Picture” (as Bronstein calls it), which can be divided into five stages: Stage 1: We do not know whether a subject S exists and we seek whether it exists. Once we know the essence of our subject S, we start investigating its demonstrable attributes. We move from Stage 4 to Stage 5 by grasping the cause of S being P, which for Aristotle is the same as discovering the essence of P (APo II 8 and Bronstein’s Chapter 10).

Results

Conclusion