Aristotle Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Aristotle - Essay Example Particularly, they figured in area of rhetorical reasoning and inquiry. Epagoge, in Aristotle’s theoretical inquiry, is the inductive procedure, which leads to the establishment of explanatory first principles as well as a demonstrative procedure that solves problems encountered on the way toward principles by deducing their correct answers from these principles once they are found.1 On the other hand, Aristotle treated nous as actually nothing but potentially all the things we can know. 2 Its significance in the scientific procedure and relationship with epagoge is anchored on its intuitive role. Nous can compare or operate through judgments by the combination or separation of concepts. The acquisition of practical first principles - moral as well as technical – is the work of reason, but not of discursive reason; it is the work of nous†¦ Nous is simply that human faculty that enables us to cognize universals on the basis of our sense-perceptions and experience; epagoge is the functioning of that faculty. (204) It is helpful, in understanding how nous and epagoge work and function, to remember that for Aristotle, all knowledge comes from pre-existing knowledge. He drew a distinction between knowledge and the preexisting knowledge – those that are knowable without qualification. Pre-existing knowledge is the outcome of sense perception while knowledge is acquired from the first principles that were borne out of induction (epagoge). (50) And so, Aristotle enlightened us that the process starts from our sensory encounters with individual material things and these encounters provide the basis of our intellectual judgments, which is the epagoge. The upshot of this process is that we are taken beyond the mere contingent empirical generalization of facts. This Aristotelian procedure, writes Newton-Smith, results in the transmission of â€Å"the natural necessity of the premises to the conclusions, thereby assuring that the entire body of scientific