Abstract

The opening chapter to the Posterior Analytics , home to Aristotle's largely unknown solution to Meno's Paradox, has been handed down to us in a badly damaged condition. I show this in two ways. First, I provide a careful exegesis of a partially parallel passage in Prior Analytics B.21, revealing that the traditional reading of this passage, crucially dependent on the received text of A.1, is indefensible. Second, I expose the severe dialectical, philosophical, and philological difficulties to which the received text of A.1 is subject. I then defend a proposal for eliminating these difficulties and restoring A.1 to a more authentic condition. The restored text of the introduction to the Posterior Analytics, and particularly the solution to Meno's Paradox it contains, affords crucial new insight into the conceptual foundations of Aristotelian epistemology