Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

ARISTOTLE’S METHOD IN METAPHYSICS 69recognition of particular metaphysical aporiai. So it is natural to ask whyhe thinks that his answer to the general question, ‘How is searching forknowledge possible?’, is not adequate to answer the more specific question,‘How is searching for knowledge in metaphysics possible?’ Perhaps this isbecause, as he says early in the Metaphysics, this science, metaphysics, ‘isfurthest removed from the senses’ (I. 2, 982 a 25). So he appears to thinkthat our capacity for sense perception, which is what in general enables usto search for knowledge, does not by itself enable us to search for this mostgeneral knowledge—the knowledge of the nature of all beings and of beingas a whole. Rather, it is our recognition of particular metaphysical aporiaithat enables us to search for knowledge in metaphysics.Let us, however, stand back and consider what in general <strong>Aristotle</strong> meansby aporia; and how, in his view, our recognition of particular aporiai abouta particular subject area enables us to search in that area. In the Topics hegives a good general characterization of the very notion of aporia:Aporia is not a characteristic of opposite reasonings…. Moreover,people who define [it] in this way [i.e. who define aporia as anequality of opposite reasonings] put effect for cause, or cause foreffect…. [Rather] it would seem that the equality of oppositereasonings is the cause of aporia; for it is when we reason on both[sides of a question] and it appears to us that everything can comeabout either way, that we are in a state of aporia about which of thetwo ways to take up.(Topics, VI. 145 b 4–20)Here we see first of all that <strong>Aristotle</strong> thinks that there is an importantdistinction between two senses of the term aporia:(1) aporia in the sense of the mental state of puzzlement and perplexity;and(2) aporia in the sense of particular puzzles and problems which, he says,are responsible for and the cause of the mental state of aporia.It is also important to note that he argues that the first sense is primary andthat the second sense is derived from it. For he argues that it is because wethink that what is responsible for our mental state of puzzlement (aporia)is, precisely, particular problems, that we call these problems: aporiai. Butthis view, which makes particular problems central to our very conceptionof puzzlement, arguably goes back to Plato, indeed the early Plato and theSocratic dialogues. For it is typical of Plato’s Socrates to reduce his