Definition and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and Generation of Animals
Robert Bolton
In Gotthelf and Lennox, eds., Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology
Cambridge, 1987

"In order to understand Aristotle's view of how the search for scientific knowledge proceeds it is crucial to understand what these varieties of knowledge or awareness of existence are. In this passage Aristotle divides them into two general types, awareness that a thing exists which involves a grasp of 'something of the thing itself', and accidential awareness that a thing exists. The latter Aristotle characterizes as awareness which gives us no hold or fix on the essence which would enable us to conduct a meaningful search for its nature (93a24-27). By contrast, non-accidential awareness does give us this sort of fix on the essence (93a27-28).... Aristotle proceeds to offer us a series of examples 'of cases where we aware of something of what a thing is' and are seeking a full understanding of what the thing is (93a29ff)." (BOLTON, pp. 132-133) [PSA: note that deliberation too is a form of search; in ethics, non-accidental awareness comes from being raised correctly, e.g., knowing something of what virtue is but not knowing its complete/correct account.]

"[W]e make further progress by finding other accounts each of which in turn explains the features which figure in the previously discovered account. By this means we come ultimately to an account of the basic essence of the kind which exhibits primitive or indemonstrable features of it." (BOLTON, p. 140) [PSA: the ergon arguments in NE and EE might be an example.]

"[A]ccording to the Posterior Analytics inquiry into some subject begins with a grasp of the fact that the thing exists, based on what is most apparent to perception. This provokes a search for an understanding of why the thing so understood exists, which is the same as a search for what it is." (BOLTON, p. 152) [PSA: philosophical inquiry also begins in wonder.]

As one example of Aristotle's definitional strategies, Bolton cites a passage from GA I.18 724a14ff: "'The starting-point of this investigation and those that follow is to first say what we take for granted (labein) concerning what sperma is. For proceeding in this way we will be much better able to inquire into its functions (ta erga) and into the derivative facts (ta sumbainonta) about it. And sperma is understood to be in its nature the sort of thing from which the things [CHECKTHIS] which are naturally formed come in the first place into being.' Aristotle here distinguishes three things concerning sperma. There is an account of 'what it is' which we take for granted, there are its functions and there are the derivative facts about it." (BOLTON, pp. 155-156) [PSA: note the similarities to ethical investigation.]

"The other matters introduced in the above passage concern the 'functions' of sperma and the 'derivative facts' about it. How are these related? The latter are for Aristotle the low-level, preferably perceptually based, data we gather which we expect to be explained or accounted for by the principles of our final theory, including our ultimate definitions (see, e.g., III.10 760b27-33). This suggests that, by contrast, the account of the 'functions' of sperma will have to do with the theoretical principles by reference to which the 'derivative facts' are explained. This conforms to Aristotle's familiar doctrine that in biology the account of a thing's function is a relatively basic item of theoretical information about it (PA I.1 639b14; cf 648a16)." (BOLTON, pp. 156-157)

END