Abstract

ARISTOTLE thought his predecessors in general, and Plato in particular, made a serious mistake in failing to mark the boundaries separating the different sciences and branches of philosophical inquiry. All of them failed to grasp the fundamental distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. Ethics and politics, the prime examples of practical knowledge, differ from such theoretical sciences as metaphysics and physics not only in their aims but in their methods and subject matter as well. Indeed, Aristotle thinks the differences are such that we cannot regard practical and theoretical knowledge as two species of a single genus, for there is no common definition of knowledge which applies to both.