Understanding, Explanation, and Insight in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics
L.A. Kosman
In Lee, Mourelatos and Rorty (eds.), Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos
van Gorcum, 1973

"For Aristotle, episteme is, in broadest terms, the explanatory art; one who understands is someone able to explain what he understands. In this sense, episteme is, as Aristotle repeatedly urges, a discursive disposition or habit of soul, a hexis, the locus of whose energeia is in the activity of apodeixis, an activity which I shall with qualification call in English 'explanation.' The explanatory art presupposes another sort of understanding, nous, which is itself a hexis, and whose nature and connection to episteme is complex and subtle." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 374)

"We think we understand something, Aristotle claims near the beginning of the Posterior Analytics (1.2, 71b9-24), when we know its aitia, that is, when we know what's responsible for it being the case, and know that that is what's responsible, and that it couldn't be otherwise." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 374)

"But here, as generally in Aristotle's writings, the notion of cause must be understood delicately. An aition is for Aristotle whatever is one of a group of factors which together are responsible for that of which they are the aitia, the conditions determining it as what it is. The term aition is used originally in moral and legal contexts with respect to the locus of blame or responsibility for some action or condition. So here, the notion of cause is in general correlative to questions which ask why, i.e. which seek to assign responsibility for something." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 376) [PSA: this is a good example of the primacy of the practical over the theoretical.]

"Any account of what leads Aristotle to identify understanding something and knowing its causes ... must understand cause to refer not to something other than the entity in question, but to the entity itself under that description which reveals certain of its kath' hauto predicates. Thus it is clear, Aristotle claims, that 'what something is and why it is are the same' (Posterior Analytics 2.1, 90a15). The why in terms of which scientific understanding is defined is simply *the nature of the phenomenon in question*." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 376) [PSA: note the connection to phusikos explanation, which goes beyond dialectic.]

"But although apodeixis in some contexts clearly does mean proof, this is not its focal sense. The root meaning of the term is 'showing forth,' and its most common occurrences in non-philosophical Greek embody the sense of showing as revealing or uncovering as much as that of showing as proving. What we need to render apodeixis is thus a term answering to the concept of something being revealed for what it is. Just as discourse for Aristotle is apo-phansis, the activity in which the world through the agency of another makes its appearance, so the activity of science is apo-deixis, the activity in which the world is revealed, in which the implicit is unfolded and made manifest." (KOSMAN-1973, pp. 378-379)

"We said that to look for a causal explanation is to look for a description appropriate to a subject such that the subject under that description is per se the predicate in question. Such a description Aristotle terms 'to meson', the middle; it is a description which links subject and predicate both conceptually, as providing the intelligible source of explanation, and ontologically, as the real ground of the subject exhibiting the predicate. What is revealed in apodeixis on Aristotle's understanding is this middle, the cause and nature of the phenomenon in question; thus what is revealed is the entity in its true being, that is, the entity qua responsible for those features which it exhibits." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 379) [PSA: this might be analogous to the role of 'to meson' in ethics, since avoiding behavioral extremes is what reveals and preserves the human way of being for an individual.]

"But episteme is not simply the state brought about by apodeixis; the relationship is more complex and subtle. In its history, episteme has a clear dispositional sense; the core of its meaning is a knowing how to, a rational capacity to. This sense is still prominent in Plato's use of the term, and it is equally preserved in Aristotle's. Episteme poietike, for example, is knowing how to make, episteme praktike, knowing how to act (e.g. Metaphysics 6.1, 1025b21-24, 11.7, 1064a10-15). And episteme apodeiktike, which comes for Aristotle to embody a more focal sense of the term episteme, exhibits the same features; it is similarly a hexis, a dispositional capacity to act, and the specific action is that of apodeixis. The definition of episteme in the Nicomachean Ethics (6.3, 1139b31) makes this clear. The epistemon, the person who has understanding, is, in other words, the person who knows how to explain in the broad sense of 'explain' which I've tried to articulate, just as the phronimos, the person who has 'practical wisdom,' is the person who knows how to act." (KOSMAN-1973, pp. 379-380) [PSA: there is an underlying sense of showing forth here: you show your understanding of the good both through action kat' areten and through being able to explain why you do what you do (e.g., to explain the deliberations that led you to commit to a particular action); cf BURNYEAT-1981 on action "with an account", i.e., meta logou.]

"Thus when we concern ourselves with questions about the logic of episteme we are concerned with the characteristics and criteria of apodeixis. Should we expect the same relationship between nous and the activity associated with it? But what is that activity? Let's begin by considering what Aristotle says about the process by which we are led to a knowledge of principles. The general term by which he designates this process is epagoge, which is usually Englished, somewhat misleadingly, as 'induction,' and which is generally contrasted by Aristotle with sullogismos or with apodeixis. This tells us very little of a specific nature about the process, for although the term epagoge sometimes has a narrow sense in which it refers to a particular method of acquiring knowledge of principles, it often refers more generally to any one of a number of paths by which we are led to such knowledge. Reference to a wide range of processes by which we reach principles does not represent simply terminological variation on Aristotle's part, but the belief that there are in fact many such ways. Besides epagoge, or alternatively, as different forms of epagoge, methods of reaching principles are said to include aisthesis or perception, ethismos or habituation, definition, and dialectic (Nicomachean Ethics 1.7, 1098b2; 7.8, 1151a15; Topics 1.3.101a36, 1.2.158b4). Certain methods are applicable to certain sorts of principles, that is, to kinds of principles appropriate to certain activities. For example, ethismos is clearly the method by which we are led to principles in ethics; for the principles of ethics are principles of praxis, of a certain kind of action, and so it is understandable that they should be acquired through habituation. For moral action is at one and the same time the act of exhibiting moral principles and the method of habituation by which they are acquired." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 386) [PSA: this seems broadly true, but it slights the role of philosophical reflection in understanding how to make beautifully right commitments, since *that* (not taking action itself) is the best measure of ethical thriving.]

"Whereas, Aristotle continues, archai have to be judged on the basis of what follows from them, and above all from the telos. In the productive sciences, the telos is the ergon, the work one is trying to produce; in the case of theoretical sciences, like physics, it is, he concludes, the phenomena, the facts which are given to perception. The concept of telos is here correlative with that of arche: goal and source of the explanatory process. And the test of whether the source has been well chosen is whether one achieves the right telos from it. Our ability or inability to use certain principles, to explain by them phenomena with which we begin and thus to gain with them scientific understanding of these phenomena, constitute the criteria of adequacy for these principles." (KOSMAN-1973, p. 387) [PSA: here again one finds the primacy of the practical, for the most fundamental telos is living well or human fulfillment.]

"Ultimately for Aristotle the process by which we explain is the process by which we acquire and grow to understand principles; it is in employing them in the act of explanation that we come to see their truth, recognize their explanatory power, and thus understand them qua principles. So nous then is related to an activity of the intellect in roughly the same way as episteme is related to apodeixis. This activity is epagoge; but it is not an activity radically independent of apodeixis. At the beginning of the Posterior Analytics, epagoge is defined as the cognitive activity which proceeds by 'revealing the general through the particular's being clearly understood' (Posterior Analytics 1.1, 71a8). If apodeixis is the act of demonstration, of revealing particulars in light of their more general causal natures, epagoge is thus the act of insight, of seeing in revealed particulars these more fundamental natures that are their principles and explanations. Thus epagoge and apodeixis are related as teaching and learning, or seeing and being seen. They are one and the same thing, but their einai is different; that is, they are one and the same thing under different descriptions. For it is the same actual energeia, scientific activity, in which we do apodeixis and epagoge, by which we explain phenomena and come to acquire the understanding of principles necessary to explanation. The states with which these activities are associated exhibit a similar dialectical relationship, as discursive understanding and insight. Thus nous as the general goal and condition of epagoge is insight as capacity and achievement; it is the ability, dispositional and actualized, to see the true causal nature in the clearly understood particular, just as episteme is the ability to understand the particular in light of that causal nature. Since understanding is possible only by virtue of such insight, of the capacity to see structure and pattern in the flux of particularity, it is ultimately nous that is the principle and source of all understanding, and thus, in particular, the arche of episteme (Posterior Analytics 2.19, 100b15)." (KOSMAN-1973, pp. 389-390) [PSA: in addition to validating my rendering of nous as insight, this passage explains why sophia is episteme plus nous, for you need the ability to see particular situations in the general principle and the general principle in particular situations.]

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