The Influence of Paduan Aristotelianism and the Genesis of the British School
The last two decades of the sixteenth century in the British Isles saw the dissemination of the works of Paduan Aristotelianism, marking the definitive defeat of the Ramist logic which had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success, although it continued to
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The Influence of Paduan Aristotelianism and the Genesis of the British School
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Griffith Powell and Paduan Aristotelianism
The last two decades of the sixteenth century in the British Isles saw the dissemination of the works of Paduan Aristotelianism, marking the definitive defeat of Ramist logic which had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success, although it continued to be taught into the next century. British Aristotelian logicians of the late sixteenth century were characterized by: (1) a great expertise in commenting on and interpreting the Aristotelian texts by means of philological instruments; (2) reference to Zabarella’s exegesis, often in a simplified form; (3) emphasis on the empirical process of knowledge; (4) a lack of originality in dealing with all parts of logic, even those related to the theory of scientific method. The most important Aristotelian scholar of the period was Griffith Powell, who within a few years, published two important commentaries on the Aristotelian logic: the Analysis analyticorum posteriorum sive librorum Aristotelis de Demonstratione (1594, reprinted in 1631), and the Analysis libri Aristotelis De sophisticis elenchis (1598, reprinted in 1664). Even if both works are ‘high-level discussions, based on the Greek texts, of the two relevant Aristotelian works and make use of some of the best commentaries available’,1 it is the commentary on the Analytica posteriora which outlines his empiricist Aristotelianism and shows Zabarella’s influence. In this commentary Powell focuses on some particular aspects of the Aristotelian doctrines, highlighting an empiricist emphasis on the importance of sensation and induction as instruments of science in the definition of logic. According to Powell, all knowledge is knowledge of causes, by means of which the mind properly knows particulars. If science seeks causes and principles, these are not what is ‘most knowable by us’, but what is ‘most knowable by nature’. What is ‘most knowable by us’, by contrast, is what comes from the senses, that is, sensations, which are always particular. 1
Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England, 36.
M. Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4951-1_6, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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The Influence of Paduan Aristotelianism and the Genesis of the British School
The Aristotelian question, rephrased in the language of Zabarella’s logic, is: how can we acquire knowledge of first principles and causes from sensations, that is, from what is most knowable to us as human beings? It is apparent, Powell argues, that we have no innate knowledge of first principles in our mind. Rather, the mind acquires knowledge of them after a laborious cognitive process which forms a habit, and so becomes able to grasp them quickly. Powell describes these workings of the mind as a process of transition from sensible to intelligible knowledge. He states explicitly that there is n
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