Epistemic Foundations of Aristotle’s Ethics

Abstract

The article sets a goal to show Aristotle’s ethics (as a practical science) has its foundations in the fundamental conceptions of his philosophy, because they describe the process of knowledge, being in general and human as a specific existence. For this purpose the author analyses the concept of “episteme” in Aristotle’s philosophy, define the structure of knowl­edge through the main questions about existence (“what?” and “how?”), and we also show the specifics of the combination of these questions in ethics. We identify the limitations of human cognitive ability and the structure of the object of knowledge, which Aristotle de­scribed through the concepts “potency”, “energy” and “entelechy”. As an object of knowl­edge, a human is revealed through the process of transition from potentially existing to actu­ally existing, while he does not have an actual completion. We make a detailed description of the object of knowledge through the conception of four causes, where the material cause fixes the potentially existing in knowledge, and three other reasons (efficient, formal, final) fix various aspects of its actualization. The description of the object of knowledge through four causes is universal for Aristotle's epistemology and it allows us to describe everything that exists as a global process of expedient change. We show that Aristotle considers the de­velopment of an individual as included in the process of human development. Its internal structure is represented by the concept of the soul, where the interaction of parts of the soul determines the quality of human activity. As a result, these notions are the epistemic founda­tions of ethics as a science, since they determine the subject of its study (human) and reveal his nature as a permanent activity that is included in the generic development and has a purpose in itself.