PUZZLES AND THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE

In the interest of furthering our understanding of Aristotle's place in the history of skepticism, A. A. Long has urged that Aristotle left to posterity a methodology that takes certain skeptical strategies that could be used to present challenges to claims to knowledge and employs them instead in aid of maintaining a search for knowledge. In the course of illustrating and defending this conclusion in his article “Aristotle and the History of Greek Skepticism”, he lucidly highlights a number of respects in which Aristotle's methodological discussions reveal an awareness of the usefulness for his own purposes of argumentative ploys that in some form or other play a role in the skeptic's arsenal. Aristotle in fact does exhibit an awareness of the need to answer on behalf of his epistemology a variety of objections that would, if successful, undermine the possibility of knowledge as he conceived of it. In this essay I discuss some of these strategies as well as the general shape of his attitude towards the use of puzzles in philosophy. My focus will not be so much on the interpretation of particular texts as on the general epistemological stance that Aristotle takes on this issue, and accordingly I have tried to avoid matters of scholarly controversy to the extent that they do not impact very general methodological points.