Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas

Aristotle’s epistemology has sometimes been associated with foundationalism, the theory according to which a small set of premise-beliefs that are deductively valid or inductively strong provide justification for many other truths. In contemporary terms, Aristotle’s foundationalism could be compared with what is sometimes called “classical foundationalism”. However, as I will show, the equivalent to basic beliefs in Aristotle’s epistemology are the so-called first principles or “axiómata”. These principles are self-evident, but not self-justificatory. They are not justified by their act of understanding, but by the arguments that satisfactorily prove them. In addition, these principles are intellectual, rather than perceptual, so that no basic belief that is about our immediate experience or sensory data is apt to provide the required foundation of knowledge. In spite of this, I argue that Aristotle’s foundationalism has no givens, and that his epistemology resists the objections usually leveled against givens.

Wittgenstein’s concept of intentionality is strongly connected with his views on language and thinking. Although his views progressively developed over time, Wittgenstein came to realise that intentionality is a property of thought that can only be accounted for in the context of ordinary language. On this basis, the view of intentionality that regards it as a natural property, or as a scientifically examinable property that can be found in the natural world is hostage to a number of paradoxes, some of which are discussed here. His atomistic view of language and reality heavily weighed on his earlier conviction that the analysis of the processes of thinking would inevitably provide a central key to intentionality. This analysis regarded thinking as a mental process with undefined and elusive features. Wittgenstein soon realised that this view was the result of unchecked prejudices, and that unless language is regarded as a capacity of thinking, and thinking as an inherently representative capacity of humans that use language in the context of language-games, intentionality will remain unknown. This article provides evidence to understand why Wittgenstein thinks this way

The claim that knowledge is grounded on a basic, non-inferentially grasped set of principles, which seems to be Aristotle’s view, in contemporary epistemology can be seen as part of a wider foundationalist account. Foundationalists assume that there must be some premise-beliefs at the basis of every felicitous reasoning which cannot be themselves in need of justification and may not be challenged. They provide justification for truths based on these premises, which Aristotle unusually call principles (archái). Can Aristotle be considered a foundationalist? Are his first principles necessary premises to right inferences? We will look at the issue here.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein warned that “the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws…leads…into complete darkness” (1958, p. 18). At the time, few philosophers and even fewer scientists were prepared to heed his warning. A half-century later, however, the reductive method of science—the method famously defined by Descartes, brilliantly exemplified by Newtonian physics, and long upheld as the gold standard of scientific explanation—seems to have finally lost its luster. While reduction is still widely defended, in the last decades alternative views have gained credibility, to the extent that a “non-reductive science” is no longer dismissed as an oxymoron.