Abstract: Aristotle often claims that some things are “more known” (gnōrimōteron), and at times that some forms of cognition are “more knowing” (gnōstikōteron, mallon eidenai), “most knowing” (malista gnōrizōn), or instances of “more science” (mallon epistēmē). Such talk of degrees of knowledge may seem innocuous: we do, after all, know some things better than others, e.g. Arabic better than Spanish. Yet Aristotle also maintains that causes and principles are more known by nature, independently of anyone’s actual cognitive state. This raises the question of what makes causes and principles “more known”. Against prominent interpretations by Barnes (1975) and Moss (2024), I argue that they are not more known because they are more intrinsically intelligible, nor because they are more certain. Rather, they are more known solely in virtue of epistemic priority: they are that through which other things are known scientifically. For this view to be plausible, however, we must explain how a claim such as “more known” can mean “known in an epistemically prior way”, despite the fact that comparatives are usually understood in terms of degree of intensity. Drawing on a passage from Aristotle’s Protrepticus that distinguishes two kinds of “more”-comparisons—those of intensity and those of priority—I argue that degrees of knowledge are best understood as the latter. Taken together, these points suggest that Aristotle’s epistemological project is neither Cartesian, grounding knowledge in maximal certainty, nor Platonist, seeking to elucidate intrinsic intelligibility, but rather architectonic: above all, it consists in determining what is known in virtue of what.
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Workshop in Ancient Philosophy Convenors: Alexander Bown (MT), Marion Durand (HT), Ursula Coope (TT).
