On 25 May 2026 at 16:15, Joshua Mendelsohn (Loyola University Chicago) will deliver the philosophy departmental colloquium in Jakobi 2, room 336 in Tartu.
Aristotle’s theoretical ideal
Robert Pasnau has argued that Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics pursues a goal radically different from that of contemporary epistemology. Rather than seeking to elucidate an ordinary notion of knowledge, understanding or even expertise, it seeks to articulate the ideal goals of theoretical inquiry, setting aside whether these goals are ever achieved.
In this paper, I concur with Pasnau that we can understand Aristotle as offering a theory of intellectual ideals, but only if we understand these in a very different way.
First, Aristotle’s epistemology needs to be understood in the context of his preoccupation with human flourishing. This does not, as in contemporary responsibilist virtue epistemology, reduce epistemology to a branch of ethics, but it does imply that Aristotle is interested in what we might call a practicable ideal. The attainment of epistēmē must be something that a human being can reasonably hope to achieve in a lifetime, even if the achievement is difficult or rare.
Second, Pasnau stresses that the project of idealized epistemology is the articulation of a distinctively human ideal, which might be opposed to the ideal of God’s knowledge. Aristotle’s epistemological project, I contend, must be understood as disrupting precisely this distinction. Aristotle’s epistemological ideal is that human beings be able to engage, for a short time and to the extent our constitution allows, in the very same activity as the divine.
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