Sem. John D.

Dela Cruz,rcj Philosophy of Knowledge

July 13, 2011 Fr. Ronald Masilang,RCJ

EPISTEMOLOGY OF ARISTOTLE In Aristotles Metaphysics, he said that all men by nature desire to know. Personally, I admit it, sometimes; I feel the desire to know more about a lot of things. But the real question here is, How do we really know? This question somehow triggered the thought of Aristotle to give a suggestion to know how man can really know a thing. In his philosophical writings, Aristotle started with the book regarding logic. Here, he discussed the logical inference of man starting with syllogism either induction or deduction and proposing the dialectical way of inference. Then he entered his theory of knowing through abstraction. Abstraction is the process of abstracting the form of a thing and became an image in the mind or what we call phantasm. But does abstraction occur? The process of knowing things all starts with the sense experience or sense perception. Man has also the sensitive soul. The soul that allows us to experience things through our senses. What we see, hear, smell, touch and taste are all perceived by our mind. It creates an image. He also shared with us his three necessary elements of knowledge, namely: the knowing subject, the known object, and the mental act of knowing. The knowing subject is the man who desires to know. The known object is the thing which is to be known by the subject. The cognition is the act of the mind which makes the object known to the subject. Practically speaking, abstraction under the act of the mind(known as cognition) is the way man knows a thing and the nature of the thing. For Aristotle, the Form which is the one abstracted by the mind from the thing is the one giving our mind the capability to know what the thing is. Aristotle also mentioned three distinct operations of the mind, namely: apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. Apprehension pertains to the formation of ideas abstracted from the thing. In other words, the mind apprehends the essence of a thing. The intellect apprehends or grasps the nature or essence of the perceived object out of the perceptual image known as phantasm. Secondly, judgment is the operation of the mind which after we perceive the things, enables us to relate what we perceived to another and decide for its agreement or disagreement.

So, judgment is the mental pronouncement regarding the agreement or the disagreement between two distinct ideas. Lastly, reasoning. After having our judgment and comparing it to another, man passes by the truth or falsity of another proposition that is related to the first proposition. Thus, reasoning is a mental process whereby man passes from what he knows to what he do not know. Having studied the theory of knowledge of Aristotle, I realized that it somehow give me the idea of knowing things in a more practical manner. We know things through sense-

perception or sense-experience. For me, this theory of knowledge is more easy to understand and more acceptable. Because it is saying to me that all the things that I have experienced since I was a kid, I should know all of it: the things that I have touched, saw, heard, tasted, and smelled; that is how powerful my mind is. And I should value these things that I know.