Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

32 THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATIONS OF ALL THINGSThe memories that he has in mind are evidently memories associated withprevious sense perceptions. So when he says that experience is generatedfrom sense perception and memory, he means that if an animal hasperceived many particular things that are all alike, for example, manyparticular trees, and if it also remembers these particular things, then thisanimal may—especially, but not exclusively, if it is a human being—develop the capacity for a single experience of such things, for example, oftrees. By ‘a single experience’ he means, apparently, a single thought (noēma,see 981 a 6), i.e. a thought with a single general content; e.g. the thought oftrees. Such a general thought will not be of any particular tree, but of treesin general; for example, it will be the thought that trees have leaves, or thattrees provide useful shelter from the sun, etc. If this is what <strong>Aristotle</strong>means here, to develop experience (empeiria) is to develop a capacity forgeneral thought.So <strong>Aristotle</strong> appears to think that what distinguishes sense perceptionfrom experience is this: sense perception is a capacity for particularknowledge, for example, the knowledge of this particular tree or thatparticular tree; experience, on the other hand, is a capacity for a kind ofgeneral knowledge, for example, general knowledge of trees, such as theknowledge that trees have leaves, or that trees provide useful shelter fromthe sun, or (to mention his own example) that fire is hot (see 981 b 12–13).That this is his view is confirmed when he says:For it belongs to experience to form the supposition that whenKallias was suffering from this disease, this drug did him good, andsimilarly in the case of Socrates and many individual cases.(981 a 7–9)In these lines, <strong>Aristotle</strong> is describing the practice of a physician who reliesexclusively on sense perception (aisthēsis) and experience (empeiria), butdoes not possess explanatory knowledge (technē and epistēmē). In otherwords, he does not at all know how to explain why his patients behave asthey do, and perhaps he is not interested in such knowledge; but he isfamiliar with common ailments of people and how to treat themeffectively. To begin with, this physician has perceived a number ofparticular cases which are all similar: Kallias behaves in a certain way, isadministered a certain drug, and responds in a certain way; Socratesbehaves in a similar way, is administered this drug, and responds in asimilar way, etc. But the physician may naturally go on to form the generalthought: patients that exhibit such and such behaviour generally respondin such and such a way to such and such a drug. We should note,