In Plato's philosophy the concept of knowledge plays an outstanding role. This contribution will show that Plato focused on this topic already in his early dialogue Protagoras. In particular the discussion about the sophistic concepts of knowledge forms the thread of this dialogue. In its first part Socrates examines the common prejudices about sophistic knowledge. His phenomenology of learning (a process of 'getting wiser') points out that knowledge is always the knowledge of something. The substance of knowledge (the mathēma) can be isolated from individual persons knowing something. Socrates underlines that human psyche feeds on mathēmata. Therefore, it is of vital importance to distinguish useful knowledge from harmful knowledge. The second - more comprehensive - part of the Protagoras offers a critical synopsis of types of sophistical knowledge. In particular, the concepts of polumathiē, of rhetorical skills, of poetological language competence and of political knowledge are discussed. In the third and final part of the dialogue Plato presents his own concept of knowledge, named ''the art of measuring''. This metretikē technē is a type of practical knowledge relating decisions based on momentary phenomena to the consequences of future actions. This kind of knowledge aims at insights preventing our loss of ethical intuitions, which in principle we have at our disposal.
Biology is the most extensive field in the Corpus Aristotelicum. In his fundamental work De anima, Aristotle tries to fix the borders of this life science. The term ψυχή has a twofold explanatory status. On the one hand, ψυχή is understood as a principle of all living beings. On the other hand, it is understood as a cause of the fact that all living beings are alive. The paper is divided into three sections. (1) The first part shows why Aristotle discusses these issues in a work entitled Περὶ ψυχῆς. Since Pythagoras and Heraclitus, ψυχή was understood as a life principle: Pythagoras believed that men, animals and plants share the same nature: they are all ἔμψυχα and they are homogenous qua ψυχή. (2) The second part of this article deals with Aristotle’s definition of the soul in DA II: ψυχή is the principle of all living things. This establishes (i) the external criteria to divide living and non-living beings and (ii) the internal criteria to divide living beings. (3) The third part of this paper is concerned with the methodological consequences of this definition: the life functions (δυνάμεις τῆς ψυχῆς) are the central explanandum in Aristotle’s biology. De anima II defines such various life-functions as nourishment, sense-perception and locomotion. These capacities contour the main fields of the philosopher’s biological investigation. For Aristotle, the faculty of reproduction is a subtype of nourishment. Reproduction is the most important and most natural function of all living beings. Genetics is, therefore, the most important field in Aristotle’s biology.
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Biology is the most extensive field in the Corpus Aristotelicum. In his fundamental work De anima, Aristotle tries to fix the borders of this life science. The term ψυχή has a twofold explanatory status. On the one hand, ψυχή is understood as a principle of all living beings. On the other hand, it is understood as a cause of the fact that all living beings are alive. The paper is divided into three sections. (1) The first part shows why Aristotle discusses these issues in a work entitled Περὶ ψυχῆς. Since Pythagoras and Heraclitus, ψυχή was understood as a life principle: Pythagoras believed that men, animals and plants share the same nature: they are all ἔμψυχα and they are homogenous qua ψυχή. (2) The second part of this article deals with Aristotle’s definition of the soul in DA II: ψυχή is the principle of all living things. This establishes (i) the external criteria to divide living and non-living beings and (ii) the internal criteria to divide living beings. (3) The third part of this paper is concerned with the methodological consequences of this definition: the life functions (δυνάμεις τῆς ψυχῆς) are the central explanandum in Aristotle’s biology. De anima II defines such various life-functions as nourishment, senseperception and locomotion. These capacities contour the main fields of the philosopher’s biological investigation. For Aristotle, the faculty of reproduction is a subtype of nourishment. Reproduction is the most important and most natural function of all living beings. Genetics is, therefore, the most important field in Aristotle’s biology.
In no field of knowledge did Aristotle leave more writings than in biology. He conducted research for longer and more intensively in zoology than in any other field. In these writings he mentions a good 550 animal and 60 plant species. While this includes the internal anatomy of around 110 animals, he dissected 60 species himself. The present contribution deals with the epistemic motifs and the meaning of Aristotelian biology in the context of his scientific curriculum. It is thus demonstrated that in De anima Aristotle’s actual explanations are preceded by an investigation of the principles, which aims to differentiate living objects from inanimate ones, and to develop a method of explanation based on the species-specific vital functions of living beings. This article provides an overview of the four main disciplines of Aristotelian biology: comparative anatomy, physiology, genetics and behavioral research. The text offers tabular overviews of the animals and plants dealt with by Aristotle.
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