Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 037 - Hugh Benson on Aristotelian Method.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Hugh Benson, who is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a visiting research fellow here at King's. Hi Hugh. Hi Peter. And I should point out that Hugh is in London this semester with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which also funds this podcast. So thank you, Leverhulme Trust. Yes, thank you. Hugh, I wanted to talk to you in this interview about Aristotelian method, which I suppose raises the question of what we would mean by a method. What do you think philosophical method means in the context of ancient thinkers like, say, Aristotle or Socrates and Plato? Yeah, I think that's a really good question to start with because I don't think we think much about method anymore, about philosophical method. And one of the things that I really like about Plato and Aristotle is they did devote so much time to the nature of philosophical method. I suppose I enjoy thinking about what I'm doing more than doing it, and fortunately they did it and thought about what they were doing. But I think because they are concerned with method, I think there are some distinctive features about their concern. One of those distinctive features, I think, is that even though they recognize that there are a variety of philosophical activities, they thought of philosophy as primarily the search for knowledge or wisdom. And so for them, the philosophical method was really the method of acquiring knowledge or searching for knowledge. And so we might call it philosophical inquiry. And the other distinctive feature is perhaps as a result of that, that they saw philosophy as a search for knowledge, that they didn't think of philosophical inquiry as distinct from other forms of inquiry, like scientific inquiry or other sorts of inquiry. They thought of philosophical inquiry as the search for knowledge, maybe knowledge in all caps or robust knowledge or understanding. But knowledge, as Aristotle sometimes calls it, knowledge haplos, full stop. And so that's what they were concerned about. And then when one looks at Aristotle, one sees that he has a variety of methods in mind when he's talking about philosophical inquiry. In the posterior analytics, which I know you've talked about already, he seems to talk about demonstration as a potential method of inquiry. In the topics, he seems to talk about dialectic as a method of inquiry. At the end of the posterior analytics and then throughout various treatises, he talks about induction or apagogue, some kind of method based on the senses as a method of philosophical inquiry. And then in the metaphysics, especially and also in other places, he talks about the aporetic method, a method that's sort of based on going through the puzzles on a given subject matter. Because the word aporea means puzzle or problem. That's right. And actually, it's sort of centered in Socratic philosophy, as many of your podcasts mention. So speaking of Socrates, one thing I wanted to ask you is, if we're thinking about inquiry, I guess an obvious place to begin thinking about inquiry is how does an inquiry begin? And Socrates, or at least Plato's version of Socrates, seems to have thought that this was a really difficult puzzle, that if you don't know anything, then you might be paralyzed and unable to begin. Do you think that that's actually a good puzzle? Is that a good place to start from when we're thinking about inquiry? I'm not sure I think it is. I think certainly Plato and Aristotle were worried about beginnings. The Greek for that is probably archae, and archae and archae, the singular, the plural and singular, are all over Aristotle and Plato's talks about method. In fact, I think one of the ways that Aristotle distinguishes between those methods that I mentioned earlier is by distinguishing between the different starting points of the method. I think Aristotle was aware of Minos' paradox. He refers to it in the poster analytics, although I think he's actually worried about a different problem there than actual paradox. And part of Minos' paradox is indeed how do we begin. But I think we have to be careful in focusing on beginnings with Aristotle and Plato. We need to be careful that we don't take them to be some sort of Cartesian foundationalist, and that they're looking for infallibly certain foundations to begin with. I think instead, their worry about beginnings has to do with a worry about devising a kind of systematic, reliable method of inquiry. And one way I think about this is a picture, I have this image of playing catch with a golden retriever. When you play catch with a golden retriever, you throw the ball out in the field, the golden retriever sees the ball, comes right back, tails wagging, it's flourishing in the Aristotelian terms of flourishing. Life couldn't be any better for the golden retriever. But if you're like me in a little perverse, at some point you will trick the dog and either not throw the ball and make it think you have or throw it when it's not looking. We vault on it. And my experience with a golden retriever is the golden retriever just goes through this mad search in the field, completely random. And I suppose people who know about this will tell me that there's a method to that madness. But from my perspective, it just looks mad. What Aristotle and Plato's concerns about beginnings have to do with is making sure that we don't behave like golden retrievers in our search for knowledge. When we don't know where it is, what they're concerned with doing is giving us some place to start and some procedure to follow. It won't be an algorithm, it won't guarantee success, but it'll be reliable and systematic and repeatable. Okay, so the bar is not set as high as Descartes would set it because the idea isn't to start from something that's absolutely indubitable, but the bar is set higher than just looking around at random. That's right. And that's why we need a method. Okay, so if Aristotle thinks then that that is a good puzzle and that we do need a method in order to get started, what does he think is the answer? What's the right method to use or does it depend on what I'm inquiring into? Well, I don't think it quite depends on what we're inquiring into, although it might, but I think at a certain level of generality it doesn't. Aristotle distinguishes, I think, between two different starting points. He talks about some as being more knowable in nature and some as being more knowable to us. It's not really clear what that distinction amounts to. It might be an ontological and epistemological distinction, but it can't just be an ontological and epistemological distinction because Aristotle seems to think that both those kinds of principles are involved in philosophical inquiry. And in fact, we can sort of now look back at those four methods. If you think of demonstration, the starting points of demonstration are demonstration is a kind of deductive system and its first principles for Aristotle have these really special properties. They're true, they're primary, they're immediate, they're better known, they're prior, they're explanatory, they're necessary. Those all look like something that's knowable in nature. Those look like Aristotelian first principles in the sort of strong sense of first principles, and that's what distinguishes demonstration from some of these other methods. Induction, for example, its beginnings, its starting points or first principles look more like sensations or perception. Aristotle has an account of how one arrives at, looks like he thinks, how one arrives at demonstrative first principles in the last chapter of the second book of the posterior analytics. Dialectic, too, looks like it might be a way to first principles, those first principles of demonstration, but its starting points are things like endoxa, which it's difficult to know exactly what that means, but a fairly reasonable translation might be reputable opinions, maybe even sort of the common sense. And then the other method that I mentioned, the aporetic method, you might think that's a way of getting at those demonstrative first principles through a kind of starting point with puzzles and aporia, ways of getting at how to resolve those puzzles are ways of getting at the first principles of demonstration. So if you think in terms of starting points, you see a kind of structure, at least insofar as Aristotle has all these methods in mind, that you begin, you can think of part of the method as an acquisition of knowledge of theorems. And that method is demonstration, and the starting points of that demonstration are these first principles, these things more knowable in nature. And then there's another method, which may include both induction, dialectic, and the aporetic method for getting at the knowledge of those first principles. So it's sort of the starting points of starting points, so to speak. And we might, if we think of all those together, that the sort of starting points of that method, you might think of as sort of phenomena. And then the question is what to include in those. And phenomena means the way things seem to us or something like that. Okay. So actually that makes it sound like if we're talking about these four things as methods, demonstration is a method in a rather different sense because the other three, so you've got dialectic, which is a consideration of reputable opinion, you've got sensation or some kind of empirical research, and you've got the consideration of puzzles. And those three would all kind of work in parallel to each other or something and would get us up, as it were, to first principles. And then once we have the first principles, we could use those to engage in this fourth kind of method, which is demonstration. And so as Aristotle says, Plato was right to ask whether we're on our way to the principles or on our way from the principles because that makes all the difference. Right. Does that mean then that demonstration is a method or philosophical method in a very different sense from the other three so that we should sort of see the other three in one category and then demonstration in another category? Well, we might. I don't think it does. You might think that demonstration is more algorithmic than the other three methods. The other three methods may require more judgment. There's less guarantee you'll get to what you're looking for. But I'm not sure that demonstration is all that algorithmic either, as any of us know who try to do proofs in geometry or logic. There's a lot of judge... There aren't algorithms one can just follow and be certain that one will get the result. So I think they both take judgment. They both sort of sides of this method require procedures and recommendations on where to begin and how to follow the procedure once you begin there. And I mean, it's certainly the case that there are differences too. I don't want to deny that. But I think Aristotle thinks that, for example, the work that geometers are doing... Some are trying to uncover the first principles of geometry, but some are trying to derive the theorems from those first principles. And I think Aristotle would think they're both engaged in the acquisition of knowledge, new knowledge. And so, I mean, there are different procedures, to be sure, but they're both philosophical methods of inquiry. And so it depends on... I guess it depends on what you think matters in making a method different. Maybe one way of thinking about it would be that all four of these are parts of one big overall method. It should be the Aristotelian method. I guess one thing that people often think about Plato and Aristotle is that Plato wanted us to kind of turn our attention away from the physical things around us. And whether that's true or not is a matter of debate. But then they would say, if you look at what Aristotle does, it's exactly the reverse. So he's out there, he's dissecting animals, he's looking at the world around him, so he's some kind of empiricist. But it seems to follow from what you just said that if he's an empiricist, it's in a way that's modified by the fact that he has these other methods, because for him, turnings to sensation is just one of three ways to get to first principles, and there's also dialectic and the apparatic method. So do you think that it really doesn't make that much sense to call Aristotle an empiricist as a result? Well, I think Jonathan Barnes calls empiricism or empiricist a slippery word. And I think he's right about that. I think it depends on what one means by an empiricist. If what you mean is Aristotle spends a lot of time and energy talking about the role of the evidence of the senses in knowledge acquisition, I think that's certainly true. He devotes a lot of attention in the treatises to how sensation or perception plays a role in knowledge acquisition, much more than Plato, I think, even though I think Plato thought the evidence of the senses did play a role in knowledge acquisition. Aristotle seems to at least be filling that out in considerable more detail. He also finds fault with people who don't seem to pay enough attention to the senses a lot in Aristotle, that is, in the treatises. So I think he certainly, in the sense of devoting attention to the evidence of the senses, Aristotle is more of an empiricist than Plato in that sense, for sure. But I think you're right in terms of asking what the role of the evidence of the senses is in the method of inquiry. The differences between Plato and Aristotle aren't quite as great as they're often made out to be. I think part of it is to underestimate the value of the evidence of the senses for Plato, but it's also, I think, to overestimate the value of the senses for Aristotle, because as you say, dialectic doesn't seem... it's not incompatible with the evidence of the senses, but it doesn't seem to place a great amount of weight on the evidence of the senses. Maybe it goes back to something you said earlier, which is that he talks about trying to be true to the phenomena, and for him that doesn't just mean things that you can see or experience, the way someone like Hume or Locke might think of experience. It could also mean things people say, things people do, things people tend to think about these subjects, and he tends to think about sense experience as being somehow in parallel with that kind of information, and it kind of all goes into one big batch of phenomena which we can use to generate inquiry. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, so that all sounds very good, and in a way it makes Aristotle sound like he's got a very plausible way of moving forward from an initial position of apparent ignorance. Do you think this is something that he actually does in his treatises? I mean, it's one thing to tell us how he thinks we should go about doing philosophy, and it's another to actually write some philosophy and use the method that he's described. That's, I think, a really good question. It's a question that a lot of scholarship by an Aristotelian method has been devoted to, I think, especially in recent times, and in fact, I think that tension between what Aristotle does in his treatises and what he says about method has led to an argument that has the result that demonstration isn't a method of inquiry, and the argument goes roughly like this. That demonstration is a sort of axiomatic proof theoretic method based on axioms or definitions or first principles. The second premise is we don't get much of that in the treatises. We do get some, and people who want to defend demonstration have found more of it in the treatises than those who don't want to defend demonstration, but we certainly don't get most of it when one looks at the metaphysics as a whole or de anima as a whole or Nicomachean ethics as a whole. It sure doesn't look like it doesn't look like you put elements. So we don't seem to get that in the treatises, but then the third premise is, but the treatises are supposed to be examples of philosophical inquiry. So the conclusion is then demonstration must not be a method of philosophical inquiry. It must be some sort of method of displaying the completed results of philosophical inquiry or something like that. Now I'm not particularly persuaded by that argument in part because I don't think the third premise that the treatises are meant to be examples of philosophical inquiry is obviously true. But what I do think is really valuable about that argument is it points to two things that we have to keep in mind when we think about Aristotelian method. One, we have to take very seriously the question, what is it that Aristotle is trying to do in his treatises? Is he engaged in philosophical inquiry? Is he modeling philosophical inquiry? Is he displaying the results of philosophical inquiry? What's he trying to do in those treatises? And the second thing that argument brings out that's essential is that however we answer that, it's important, and to some extent I think this wasn't recognized as it should have been earlier, it's important to accommodate what Aristotle says about his method with what he actually does, and not to keep those two things distinct as it's sort of easy to do if one just focuses on what he says. And why is that important? Is it because if he says that he's going to do it one way and then he does it another way, that would just be kind of philosophically unsatisfying? Or would it show that we must have the wrong idea about the treatises, so maybe they're just for teaching purposes or something and not for inquiry purposes, and that's why they don't match up? What exactly would be the worry? Well I think the worry is that we'd expect Aristotle to be, I'm not sure what the word that I want here, to be genuine so to speak, not to describe a method that he's not willing to practice, I mean not to sort of recommend to us here's a way of engaging an inquiry and yet he goes off and does something else, he's got sort of a secret method back in his office that he uses. So I think that's part of it. I don't think, and in fact this is the point about worrying about the third premise, it's not obvious to me that what we have to do is accommodate what Aristotle says about his method with what he does in the treatises. What we have to do is accommodate what Aristotle says about method with what he does in terms of philosophical inquiry, then the question is, is how do you figure out what it is that Aristotle's doing in engaging an inquiry? It may be in the treatises, probably is in some treatises, not in others, that sort of thing, but that's a sort of separate question. When is Aristotle engaging in philosophical inquiry? And that, when he is, that better match up to what he says about philosophical inquiry. Right, so there could be sort of an account of what the inquiry should look like, then there's the inquiry which maybe happened off the page, and then there's the treatise. You might think about something like the history of animals, which doesn't look like he's actually telling you about his inquiries, it looks more like he's telling you the results of his inquiries. If you think of dissection as a method of inquiry, he's not engaging in dissection. When he sits down to write the treatise. For one thing it's too messy. Right, he's engaging in the results of that method. Right. Last question, how optimistic do you think Aristotle is about all this? I mean, he's got an inquiry method, or he's maybe got several methods of inquiry, and he certainly seems to think that he himself has made a lot of progress, for example compared to his predecessors, including Plato. Do you think that he thinks, well, most people could do this if they gave it a shot and were as reflective about it as I have been, and if they follow my advice, do you think that he thinks this is something only the elite could do, him and maybe a few favored students, and do you think that he thinks this may be a slightly separate issue, do you think he thinks there's a lot more to do still, or do you think he's pretty much polished it off and that philosophy is completed with him? I mean, so how optimistic is he both on the side of how easy this is to do and how much has already been accomplished by the time he's dead, let's say? There's a certain amount of conceit in Aristotle for sure, and there are moments in the treatises where you get the feeling that he actually thinks he's pretty much finished it all, but I think most of the time he doesn't feel that way, he thinks there's a lot of work to be done. He certainly thinks that it's very hard to do, I think he agrees with Plato that it's a long and difficult road to acquire this knowledge. I think what really distinguishes Aristotle from Plato in a way that's connected to this question of pessimism is that Aristotle seems much more interested in sort of the intermediate states than Plato is. Plato has a view that robust knowledge is so valuable that he just doesn't much care about things that fail to be robust knowledge. Aristotle devotes a lot of attention to identifying and distinguishing in even being willing to call those cognitive states knowledge, short of the robust knowledge that he fails to have but he thinks that can be acquired. So you get distinctions in Aristotle between knowledge that and knowledge why, between universal knowledge and particular knowledge, between knowing something universally and knowing it haplos or full stop. And all of that I think is part of Aristotle's common sense. Plato is sort of willing to bite the bullet and say, I know we talk about Benson having knowledge but he doesn't have robust knowledge so whatever he has just doesn't really matter. Aristotle's willing to let me have a little knowledge even though he would agree with their, we would all agree I fail to have robust knowledge. Certainly in Plato's terms. And speaking of Plato's robust philosophy and Aristotle's maybe more modest ambitions, next time I'm going to be looking at Aristotle's views on substance and I'll talk a little bit about how they might compare to Plato's more ambitious theory of metaphysics and substance. But for now I'd just like to thank you Benson very much for coming on. Well thanks for having me. And join me next time for Aristotle on substance, next time on the history of philosophy without any gaps.