Aristotle’s Dianoetic Virtues: Science and Truth
Abstract:
This fragment explores Aristotle’s discussion of the dianoetic virtues, the means by which the soul attains truth: art, science, prudence, wisdom, and intellect. The focus is on science and its object. According to Aristotle, the subject of science is necessary, eternal, and can be learned or taught. Learning and teaching occur through induction or syllogism. Science, therefore, is a demonstrative way of knowing, ideas already suggested in the Analytics.
Contextualization:
The dianoetic virtues, particularly science, align with Aristotle’s concept of virtue in his Nicomachean Ethics. Virtue is a field of practical rationality concerning action and moral knowledge. Moral knowledge, according to Aristotle, aims at practical matters, characterized by potential error. Moral knowledge is possible because things can be otherwise. This knowledge prepares us to discuss what is good and what we can do under favorable circumstances. Virtue is a selective way of being, a mean determined by reason and the decision of a wise person. Aristotle differentiates between:
- Dianoetic virtues (rational part of the soul).
- Ethical Virtues (irrational part of the soul’s desires, controlled by reason).
Episteme, or science, for Aristotle, is deductive knowledge that assumes the validity of principles, grasped by the intellect or nous. Science is eternal and can be learned. Its mode of being is demonstrative. Aristotle discusses the problem of being in his Metaphysics from four perspectives: substance (and its essence), matter, the cause and principle of motion, and purpose.
In Physics, Book II, he distinguishes two types of beings:
- Those that exist by nature: animals, plants, etc.
- Those that exist due to other causes, artificial: beds, clothes, etc.
Natural beings have within themselves a principle of movement and rest. Artificial beings have within themselves the principle of their production.
In the production of something, there are four causes:
- Material (that from which something appears or is made).
- Formal (its essence).
- Efficient (that by which something comes into being).
- Final (the end toward which something tends).
Everything that moves is moved by another. All material is primary substance composed of matter and form, existing in potential (subject to change) and in actuality (executor). Natural things move to meet an end in themselves, a telos, identical to their form, eidos. In natural things, the efficient, final, and formal causes are the same.
Aristotle distinguishes three types of beings: natural, artificial, and practical.
Aristotle, a giant in the History of Philosophy, is rooted in the classical Greek world. A pupil of Plato and founder of the Peripatetic school, the Lyceum, he diverged from Plato’s theory of ideas. For Aristotle, ideas or forms, though immutable and eternal, cannot exist without matter. Thought, through abstraction, can separate matter and form. From the 13th century onward, through the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle was fully recovered in Western philosophical culture. His philosophy remains relevant today.
Aristotle came from a family with a medical tradition; his father, Nicomachus, was court physician of Macedonia. The cultural context of the time included scientific concerns, and Aristotle made significant advances in the natural sciences. His primary interest was the investigation of nature, particularly living beings. He was the first great biologist in history. He did not limit himself to observation but sought to establish the philosophical basis of the empirical sciences. He was, therefore, primarily a scientist and a philosopher of science.