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All teaching and all learning of the discursive sort arises out of pre-existent knowledge.(Posterior Analytics, I.1 71a1–2)With this, the very first sentence of his treatise on scientific explanation, Aristotle announces a striking epistemic principle in a manner quite possibly intended to bring to mind the Platonic doctrine of recollection in the Meno.(P1) Every piece of knowledge arises out of some pre-existent knowledge.At first sight, this principle seems quite anti-foundationalist in spirit. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that two chapters later it is pressed into service by Aristotle to support a foundationalist theory of epistemic justification. The main topic of the treatise is a very special type of knowledge, indeed what Aristotle regards as the very highest form of knowledge, or what he calls “knowledge simpliciter.” His settled view throughout the Analytics is that one doesn't really know a given truth in the fullest sense unless one knows not merely that it is true but also why it is true. And since, within the theory of deductive inference developed in the Prior Analytics and presupposed throughout the Posterior Analytics, to know why something is true is to have constructed an adequate syllogistic demonstration that establishes the proposition in question, he understandably equates knowledge simpliciter with demonstrated knowledge.In Posterior Analytics I.3, ... log in or subscribe to read full text