Kant and Aristotle

Epistemology, Logic, and Method

Marco Sgarbi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438459998
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía moderna

Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant's transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, such as the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century.

1

FACULTATIVE LOGIC

THE OPERATIONS OF THE MIND

Facultative logic has been defined as the science of “the principles of the habituated regulation of the mind in the apprehension of truth and the acquisition of knowledge and properly grounded opinion.”1 Although divided on the question of identifying its origin, scholars generally agree that it is a new early-modern conception of logic. Its rise, for James Buickerood, may be traced to the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in which the ideas were the result, the product of the operations of the human cognitive faculties of perception, imagination, memory, and judgment in their relation to the world.2 This opinion is supported also by Paul Schuurman, who nevertheless stresses the importance of Malebranche as the first philosopher to build a new logic around human cognitive faculties,3 and René Descartes, who provided the basis and first principles, but left it to his followers to apply his new insights in the field of facultative logic.4 Instead, Sylvain Auroux and Frederick S. Michael trace the birth of facultative logic back to the Logique de Port-Royal (1662).5 Logic, according to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, consists in the “reflections of men on the four operations of mind, conceiving, judging, reasoning and ordering.”6 Facultative logic thus concerns the operations of mind, serving to rightly conduct human reason to the knowledge of things. A closer view, however, shows that this conception comes from Bartholomeus Keckermann’s Systema Logicae (1601), where logic is defined as the “art of directing mind in the cognition of things,” in particular, in “understanding, knowing, and thinking,”7 which in turn is derived from Renaissance Aristotelians, in particular from Jacopo Zabarella’s logical writings. For this reason, in this chapter I propose to contextualize the origin of facultative logic within the Aristotelian tradition. The subjects of facultative logic are concepts rather than terms, judgments rather than propositions, reasonings rather than syllogisms.8 It emerged from the combination of psychology and logic at the end of the sixteenth century, departing from Scholastic syllogistic.9

In this sense, facultative logic differs from both “epistemic logic” and the “logic of ideas.” “Epistemic logic” does not cover the psychological dimension of the problem of knowledge, rather it “has to do with necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing and with the inferential relations involving epistemic and other propositional-attitude statements.”10 The “logic of ideas,” on the other hand, concerns the various possible combinations among the manifold mental contents, rather than the certainty and the truth of the discourse, as epistemic logic does.11 Instead, facultative logic is concerned with the origin and the logical use of the natural powers of the mind in knowing an object. It was born from the discussions on the theory of habits, especially the habit of understanding, which became the main faculty of the human mind for knowledge, namely, that which differentiates human beings from animals.12 In particular, I support the provocative thesis that the real Copernican revolution in the field of epistemology was possible only from a reconsideration of Aristotelian logic in early modernity with a new understanding of the dialectic between the knowing subject and the known object. In this chapter, I would like to suggest the impact of this revolution on Kant’s logic.

There was no genuine facultative logic in Ancient Greece because, to start with, there was no corresponding concept to that of “faculty.” The term most widely used to define it, δύναμις, denoted in a most meaningful way a force more than a capacity, for which at least an “intentional” activity of the subject is necessary.

In Republic IV, 440E, Plato deals with three parts of the soul: (1) the rational part, which thinks and suppresses the instincts; (2) the irrational or concupiscible part, which rules the impulses and needs; and (3) the irascible part. Thereafter, in the fifth book, Plato outlines a distinction between two different cognitive powers or forces and their objects,13 ἐπιστήμη and δόξα, “by which human beings are able to do what they are able to do.”14 Plato uses the term δύναμις to denote these kinds of cognitive faculties, but he often uses the cognitive verbs γιγνώσκω and νοέω in its place. Clearly Plato does not use terminology in a careful and technical way, but sometimes “he uses more than one term to refer to the same element in the theory, or the same term to refer to different elements in the theory.”15

In Aristotle, things change quite drastically. First of all, Aristotle does not deal with parts, but with functions of the soul: vegetative, sensible, rational, and locomotive. All these functions have in themselves a characteristic force thanks to which the human being can grow, sense, think, and move. Only the rational part of the soul, however, is properly called “faculty.” Aristotle in fact states that “to think depends on the subject, when it wants to exercise his knowledge, but sensation does not depend upon itself because a sensible object must be there.”16 Imagination itself, which mediates knowledge between sensation and understanding, is a force, not a faculty. On the one hand, Aristotle states, imagination “is not of the same kind of thought of apprehension,”17 because it does not depend totally on the subject but on the affection of the sensation; on the other hand, however, it seems to involve active thought.18 Imagination is properly a force or disposition in virtue of which human beings discern and judge whether something is erroneous or not, and is not of the kind of sense, opinion, science, intelligence.19 Imagination cannot be sensation, because sensation is in all animals, whereas imagination is not. It is neither science nor intelligence, because these are always true, while imagination can be false. Imagination cannot be opinion because it is in some animal, while opinion is not. It must be a force, that is “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of senses.”20

If facultative logic in Aristotle was not primarily concerned with either sensation nor imagination, it would deal with the understanding. In On the Soul, however, Aristotle describes physiologically how the sensible object becomes intelligible, and he outlines only a few epistemological reflections. Kant himself defines Aristotle’s attempt as a kind of physiology, which is akin to Locke’s standpoint, as we will see later in this chapter (17: 554).

The only place in the entire Aristotelian corpus where an attempt at drafting a facultative logic is made is the thirty-nine lines in Posterior Analytics, II.19.21 Aristotle states that there “exists a discriminative innate force in all animals that is sensation.”22 Sensibles then, Aristotle adds, in some animals, rest in the mind. If sensibles do not rest in the mind for these animals, there is no other knowledge than the sensible one. In other animals, the sensible object rests in the mind, and after various sensations a kind of conceptualization is possible. From this kind of sensation originates memory and, subsequently, experience. From experience a general concept (καθόλου) is formed that rests in the mind. In this way, it is possible to acquire the disposition for scientific knowledge. The mental process, which infers from the various particulars to what is the same in all of them, is a kind of induction (ἐπαγωγή). The mental process of assent to the product of this induction is called intellection (νοεῖν). The process of acquiring general concepts and principles is therefore twofold: on the one hand, we have the formation of knowledge, which relies on experience and is mainly discursive; then, on the other hand, we have the actual cognition, which is a kind of an intuitive act of grasping what is given and generated by experience. The inductive process is necessary for the cognition of immediate and first principles, from which every scientific demonstration begins, and which is at the outset qualitatively different from the cognition after the conclusions of the demonstration. This marks a passage from a general indeterminate concept to a determinate universal concept. In fact, the formation and intellection of general concepts and principles produces only temporary knowledge, which must be proven discursively by means of demonstration to make of it scientific knowledge.

Aristotle’s “facultative logic” plays with the discriminative force of sensation and with memory, on the one hand, and on the other hand, with understanding, so as to determine how sensible knowledge could become universal and epistemic. Aristotle’s brief outline of facultative logic was almost the only example in the Aristotelian tradition until the Renaissance on which the Greek commentators first, and then the medieval thinkers, based their investigations. The question of the intellectus adeptus, acquisitus, and speculativus, for example, first outlined by Alexander of Aphrodisias and then fully developed by Averroes, is a development of Aristotle’s theory of the understanding.23

In Germany, the problem of facultative logic in the Renaissance reemerges with Philipp Melanchthon and his Liber de anima. Melanchthon writes that the mind is usually credited with three operations: (1) simple apprehension; (2) composition and division; and (3) discourse.24 They correspond, within the Aristotelian canon, to (1) induction (simple term); (2) synthesis and analysis (proposition); and (3) reasoning (syllogism). Melanchthon then specifies in detail all the operations of the mind. They are simple cognition, enumeration, composition and division, reasoning (complex logical inferences), memory, and judgment.25

Melanchthon’s legacy in German Scholastic philosophy is long lasting and is even very vivid in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and logic lectures, so much so, in fact, that Brandt writes: Kant “will employ the concept of consciousness in his long-standing search for the proper form of logic. However, in the edition of 1781, Kant no longer speaks of consciousness, but rather of the Aristotelian tradition’s operationes mentis.”26 Indeed, on closer examination, Kant’s transcendental logic is modeled on the three operations of the mind. Transcendental logic, however, finds its parallel in general logic, therefore, “general logic is constructed on a plan that corresponds quite precisely with the division of the higher faculties of cognition. These are: understanding, the power of judgment, and reason. In its analytic that doctrine accordingly deals with concepts, judgments, and inferences, corresponding exactly to the functions and the order of those powers of the mind, which are comprehended under the broad designation of understanding in general.”27 Traces of Melanchthon’s conception are scattered throughout the Kantian corpus. Again, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes that the form, abstracting from the content (or matter) of cognition, has no other task than that “of analytically dividing the mere form of cognition into concepts, judgments, and inferences, and thereby achieving formal rules for all use of the understanding” (A 132–33/B 171–72). In The Vienna Logic, Kant asks himself: “how many operations of the mind are there? Response. Three. Simple apprehension, judgment, and inference” (24: 904). From The Busolt Logic we know that “logic has to do with the understanding: the operationes mentis were already divided by the ancients, that is: apprehensio simplex or conceptus, iudicium et ratiocinium” (24: 653). Kant clearly has the Aristotelian tradition in mind: “one should deal with the three operations of thought before inferences. This was the way strictly followed by Aristotle. Wolff left it” (24: 763).28 Kant could read Melanchthon directly, however, his nearest available source being Martin Knutzen’s logic, which clearly establishes that: “there are only three fundamental operations of the mind or of understanding. The first one is simple apprehension, the second one is judgment and the third is reasoning.”29 However, as we will see, Kant could read this partition in many other eighteenth-century logicians such as Baumgarten, Crusius, and Reimarus. Nonetheless the fact that he recognizes that his classification belongs to Aristotle allows us to surmise that his reference was the Königsberg Aristotelians.

On the tripartition of the cognitive faculties of Melanchthonian derivation Kant founded his attempt to build up a logic as science that could identify the laws of the mind in an ex...