TRANSITION FROM SCIENCE TO ETHICS: ARISTOTLE'S APPEARANCES

When Aristotle talked of the path of discovery in the first chapter of the Physics he had in mind a smooth and gradual transition from the perspective of perception to the attainment of first principles and not, as Plato had done, a journey of almost frightening disorientation. But so far we have only been considering Aristotle's views on scientific discovery, whereas our treatment of Plato was at least as much concerned with ethical discovery. It was, after all, ethical discovery that originally gave rise to the problem in the Meno. The purpose of this chapter is to see how far these conclusions about Aristotle's account of scientific discovery can be applied to ethics. Phys. I i says at the outset that its account of discovery will apply to all inquiries in which there are first principles. But does he really mean to include ethics?

I have already suggested that we should not be too eager to find a tidy fit between scientific and ethical discovery given the repeated warnings in the Nicomachean Ethics against ignoring the differences between the two. On the other hand, one prima facie reason for expecting to find something common to both areas is that he sometimes uses the same terminology when talking about discovery both in science and ethics. The distinction between the more knowable to us and the more knowable in nature, which we found pervasive in scientific contexts, crops up in his ethical works as well. But the common term that has attracted the most interest is the term phainomenon, which I shall translate as ‘appearance’.