Abstract

Part I deals with language and knowledge. Chapter 1: Plato’s Cratylus presents two opposing views of meaning—naturalism and conventionalism—and finds both wanting. Aristotle’s De Interpretatione offers a compromise between these views: the relations between written and spoken words and between spoken words and mental states are conventional, but that between mental states and the objects they represent is natural. Chapter 2: Aristotle holds a correspondence theory of truth, and he treats necessity as a property that a statement has in relation to what it asserts. These are important for his claim that scientific knowledge must be derived from necessarily true first principles. Chapter 3: Posterior Analytics argues that the human mind is so related to the world that it is able to grasp the basic categories and kinds existing in reality. Modrak rejects as overly Cartesian the intuitionist interpretation of nondemonstrative knowledge of first principles and universal concepts; instead, she argues, Aristotle is an empiricist and moderate realist: really existing kinds cause humans to know them through sense-experience and induction. But it remains mysterious how they are able to do this. Chapter 4: Aristotle’s three types of demonstrative science—mathematics, natural science, and first philosophy—are all empirically based. The method of dialectic employing endoxa complements this empirical approach.