Students of Aristotle's thought have, from antiquity to the present, pointed out that he is quite frequently concerned with questions about exactness or inexactness. Aristotle often speaks, for example, about the level of exactness his own investigations attain, the level that is desirable, or the level that is possible in a certain kind of investigation or discipline.

At other times his concern is with the exactness/inexactness of the subject matter a discipline investigates and its relation to the exactness/inexactness of the discipline itself. At yet other times his attention is directed to different questions: Can inexactness be eliminated from the accounts a discipline gives of a certain subject matter? What epistemological consequences does inexactness have? Does it, for instance, affect the demonstrative character of a discipline?

Remarks that touch on issues pertaining to exactness/inexactness are to be found in all of Aristotle's works. But they figure most prominently in the treatises on conduct, especially in the N.E. Commentators have invariably argued that the remarks in the N.E. , unlike those in other Aristotelian treatises, say something quite important about Aristotle's conception of the nature of ethical inquiry or its epistemological character. To some, these remarks assert or imply that ethics is an inexact inquiry, a discipline that fails to attain that ideal of exactness we associate with the most pure and rigorous disciplines. To others, they assert or imply something even stronger: namely, that ethics is not a demonstrative discipline at all, that it cannot even be one of the demonstrative sciences that Aristotle recognizes.

These claims made by the commentators regarding the meaning and epistemological implications of Aristotle's remarks on exactness in the N.E. may contain some truth. It may very well be that some types of inexactness in a discipline or its subject matter imply that the discipline cannot be as demonstratively pure or rigorous as some other disciplines. It may even be the case that certain types of inexactness in a discipline imply that the discipline is not demonstrative at all. However, other types of inexactness may have no such implication, or they may have only minor implications with respect to the epistemological character of a discipline.

In other words, it is difficult to say whether there is any truth in these general claims about the implications of Aristotle's remarks on exactness. The problem lies in part in the fact that he identifies several quite different types of exactness—and, therefore, inexactness—and he attributes exactness/inexactness to various domains that may consist of things that are not necessarily of the same logical type.

The term Aristotle uses most often when he speaks of exactness signifies a variety of things; the term is, if you like, inexact. Indeed, as we shall see, Aristotle uses a variety of terms to signify exactness or inexactness, and not all of them mean the same thing. The things that Aristotle is willing to characterize as exact/inexact are not necessarily the sorts of things we are willing to designate as such. Aristotle seems to have no difficulty in applying his terms for exactness/ inexactness to just about anything. ...

Read Aristotle on the Goals and Exactness of Ethics Oline

by Georgios Anagnostopoulos
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1994 The Regents of the University of California

CONTENTS:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Aristotle's Works

One  Introduction
Two  The Philosophical Background
Three  The Goals of Ethical Inquiry
Four  Exactness: Some Basic Questions
Five  Outline, Exactness, and the Particular
Six  Being for the Most Part: Its Meaning, Scope, and Nature
Seven  Demonstration and What Is for the Most Part
Eight  Variation, Indefiniteness, and Exactness
Nine  Exactness and Pragmatics
Ten  Exactness, Universality, and Truth

Notes
Bibliography
Index:  Passages from Aristotle's Works
Index:  Key Greek Words
Index:  Names and Subjects

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