Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 19:25:54 -0500
Subject: Re: truth


Michael Eldred wrote:

> Self-certainty is not self-awareness. In other words, self-certainty in 
> Aristotle is not an issue for the grounding of truth.

That is true, but this is equally explicable under my interpretation - that self-
certainty is not the ground of truth for Aristotle precisely because he held that 
we can be certain of more than self. So I still am not sure why your explanation 
would be preferable to mine on this particular point.

> > But again, there are specific texts which support my interpretation over the
> >  one 
> > which you have proposed - specifically, the ones in the Metaphysics and the 
> > Posterior Analytics. According to your interpretation, Aristotle should have 
> > never criticized the dream argument AS a violation of a necessary and 
> > absolutely certain first principle of demonstration, which is precisely what
> >  he did in the Metaphysics in conjunction with the Posterior Analytics. 
> 
> I have already provided an alternative interpretation of the texts you have 
> adduced. Dreaming is for Aristotle merely one example among others (viz. 
> appearances for a sick person differ from those for a healthy person) for 
> appearances being deceptive. 

Yes, but Descartes uses precisely the same examples in the First Meditation - 
a sick person, etc.). In fact, all the examples Aristotle brings up are precisely 
the ones used by all the Enlightenment philosophers who argued that no 
appearance is immediately more true than any other (Descartes, Berkeley, 
Hume). Even Husserl uses the dream argument to eliminate the apodicticity of 
metaphysical existence in the phenomenological reduction.

> Aristotle posits different first principles from 
> Descartes. Why? Because each is thinking within a different historical opening 
> of the truth of beings. The starting point for this whole debate was the shift 
> from subjects being the things out there in the world to subjects being 
> conscious subjects encountering objects. 

The drawback in this interpretation is that philosophers living around the same 
"historical opening" as Aristotle (namely, the ones Aristotle addressed in Met. 
Gamma) used the same arguments as Descartes to support precisely the 
same point - the equality of all appearances (with respect to their "reality"). If 
different "historical openings" were the root of the difference between Aristotle 
and Descartes, then philosophers living in that ancient historical opening 
should have never even seen the possibility of dream argument, much less 
given it serious consideration, as clearly was the case according to Aristotle. 
Due to this drawback, I believe that a better explanation of Aristotle's rejection 
of the dream argument is that it did not have the "success" of Elightenment 
natural science behind it, especially concerning the brain as the "organ of 
sensation." One can see threads of this not only in Descartes, but also in 
Hobbes, and especially in Hume. New discoveries in natural science are what 
allowed the dream argument to actually triumph in the Enlightenment when it 
had failed to convince Aristotle. (The same explanation can be used to account 
for the failure of ancient Greek atomic theory and the success of the 
Elightenment version, as well as the failure of the ancient Greek version of 
natural selection and the success of Darwin). This does not mean, however, 
that dream argument itself depends on those "findings" in natural science 
concerning biology, light, etc. Rather, the astounding "success" of the new 
natural science merely further reduced the possibility of philosophers "missing" 
the force of the dream argument in the way that Aristotle missed it in his own 
time. In other words, there will be less people who fail to "see" the force of the 
dream argument if it coincides with the findings of a powerful new science. And 
indeed, the subjectivity of sensation coincides with the idea propounded by 
Elightenment natural science that sensation, hallucination, and dreaming are 
all essentially the same thing - "nerves stimulating the brain."

Anthony Crifasi


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