Aristotle on Knowledge and the Knowable

Abstract

Aristotle has a general concept of knowledge, which he labels gnōsis (in addition to his various concepts of specialized kinds of knowledge such as epistēmē). This paper illuminates Aristotle’s gnōsis by studying at his treatment of the gnōrimon (‘knowable’). Despite, Aristotle’s distinction between what is knowable by nature and what is knowable to us, and his application of ‘gnōrimon’ both to propositions and to objects, he has a unified notion of the gnōrimon, namely that with which we can be well acquainted. This strongly suggests that gnōsis is knowledge in the sense of good acquaintance. All knowledge, propositional or not, is a matter of being well acquainted with reality. Thus, on Aristotle’s view, all humans by nature desire to know not primarily because we want our beliefs to be certain or justified or the like, but because we want reality to be well known to us, like a well-known person.