Does knowledge of medicine depend on knowledge of biology? A question for Aristotle

Brennan McDavid (University of Melbourne)

Abstract

In the first chapter of the Metaphysics, Aristotle discusses the structure of medical knowledge. He says that a person with medical knowledge (i.e. a doctor), is someone who has understanding of not merely the fact that some medical fact is true, but why it is true. He explicitly contrasts this kind of explanatory knowledge with mere experience, which he says consists in grasping the fact alone, without the reason why. “Healers” have mere experience, but doctors have the experience plus the explanation. This discussion has driven many Aristotle scholars to conclude that doctors are, on Aristotle’s conception, differentiated from healers through understanding the biological reasons why medical facts are so. That is, they take Aristotle to be saying that the relevant explanations for the doctor are scientific explanations.

In this talk I will show that this interpretation grossly misrepresents Aristotle’s epistemology. Through consulting the Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle presents his theory of scientific knowledge, we can see that Aristotle’s epistemology delimits domains of knowledge very precisely and makes clear that biology and medicine are quite separate domains. More importantly, even where domains of knowledge do make contact—through the “subordination relation” or the “quasi-subordination relation”—Aristotle is explicit that knowledge of one domain in no way depends on knowledge in the other. In other words, doctors qua doctors are not biologists, but those domains of expertise are related in an interesting way.