Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

For the neo-Platonists, this was perhaps knowledge from Spirit. Aristotle gave us ‘phronēsis’ (Greek — practical reason) as the method of deciding how best to act morally and in accord with common-sense. Back with Plato, and as we’ve seen he took ‘reason’ to mean knowledge of the forms. But he contrasted this with ‘understanding’, which he took to be more of a pragmatic knowledge. (Logic and mathematics, plus sometimes some other abstract ideas get the name ‘formal’ in recognition of this distinction.) Plato also distinguishes between knowledge that has certainty and ‘opinion’, which he took to be based on the senses, and therefore fallible. ‘The Good’, for Plato (and possibly also for Plotinus) is not the essence of things — ‘the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power’. Both Plato and Aristotle contrast ‘praxis’ — knowledge that requires skill — with ‘poiēsis’ — knowledge that requires virtue. Aristotle also included ‘theoria’ as a further type of knowledge — which John Ruskin translated well as ‘contemplation of the nature of things’.

So there are several types of knowledge here. There is practical knowledge, related directly to the way the world is observed, and there is theoretical knowledge, which can be related to the several types of foundational truth-seeking introduced in the last chapter. In this chapter, the focus will be on theoretical knowledge and the theories of truth will be examined in a bit more detail. So let’s start with those two terms introduced in the last chapter — necessary and contingent.

A necessary statement or proposition is one that

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