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

Poetry, History, and DialecticTwice in the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts poetry with history. Whatever its didactic value, the contrast has not seemed to readers of special philosophical interest. The aim of this root word is to show that this contrast is philosophically significant not just for our understanding of calamity but also for the light it sheds on Aristotles overall methodology. I shall show how he uses the method sketched in the Topics to define tragedy and explain why the same method will not define history. In particular, tragedy admits of definition because its parts constitute a unity, and much of the Poetics aims to show how, despite being defined through six distinct parts, tragedy can be one. In contrast, history, though a proper 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 used here to explain why any attempt to create a scienti fic 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 find indemonstrable first principles from common opinions for, being capable of examining, dialectic has a path to the principles of all disciplines (B ) (I.2.101b3-4). Scientific knowledge of a causa consists of grasping 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 determined 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 before dialectic discovers its principles? It is clear from our Topics text that this examination will look for common opinions, and it is well recognise that Aristotles actual inquiries often begin f rom 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 Prior Analytics, he speaks of deriving the principles of each field from experience and he refers to the account of the phenomena of a field as a history () (46a17-27). Evidently, history precedes science, and transition is effected by dialectic. Aristotle has much to say about how knowledge is derived from sensation and experience, but he never explains how (or whether) his many remarks converge together into a single process.