Poetry, History, and Dialectic :: Philosophy Argumentative Argument Papers

Poetry, History, and DialecticTwice in the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts poetry with history. any(prenominal) its didactic value, the contrast has not seemed to readers of special philosophical interest. The aim of this newspaper publisher is to show that this contrast is philosophically significant not just for our intellectual of calamity but also for the light it sheds on Aristotles boilersuit methodology. I shall show how he uses the method sketched in the Topics to touch on tragedy and explain why the same method will not define history. In particular, tragedy admits of definition because its parts constitute a unity, and a lot of the Poetics aims to show how, despite being defined through six intelligible parts, tragedy can be one. In contrast, history, though a straight-laced preliminary to poetics and concerned also with human action, does not admit of scientific treatment because it contains no essential unities. Aristotles understanding of science is apply here to ex plain why any attempt to create a scientific history would turn history into poetry.IAristotle claims that the art of dialectic sketched in the Topics contributes to philosophical knowledge because it can be used to incur indemonstrable first principles from commons opinions for, being capable of examining, dialectic has a passage to the principles of all disciplines (B ) (I.2.101b3-4). Scientific knowledge of a subject consists of grasp its principles and demonstrating its essential attributes from them. How does one come to know the first principles? Obviously, they cannot be present from prior principles they are first principles. As such, they are somehow unflinching by dialectic. Thus, dialectic transforms what we can call, for lack of a better term, a subject matter into a science. What is the state of this subject matter onward dialectic discovers its principles? It is clear from our Topics text that this examination will look for common opinions, and it is well recogn ized that Aristotles actual inquiries often begin from common opinions.(1) So the pre-scientific subject matter must contain common opinions about its facts. Aristotle has a name for such a setting out of facts in the preliminary Analytics, he speaks of deriving the principles of each field from experience and he refers to the consider of the phenomena of a field as a history () (46a17-27). Evidently, history precedes science, and conversion is effected by dialectic. Aristotle has much to say about how knowledge is derived from sense and experience, but he never explains how (or whether) his many remarks fit together into a single process.