Note: This might just be a load of rubbish, especially if I have misunderstood it.

Oh! My head hurts. I've just been on the net and thought this might explain what we are all doing here on this forum. And it might explain why I put up with you lot - and vice versa.

Segment taken from - Aristotle - Metaphysics (Book 1)

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au...e/metaphysics/

With a view to action experience seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even better than those who have theory without experience. (The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man.

If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not.

For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause. Hence we think also that the master-workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns,- but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency, the labourers perform them through habit); thus we view them as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes.

And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.

Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything-e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.



If I understood this correctly, and in reference to us on here, Skeptics have the theory and we non-Skeptics have the experience. Skeptics don't have the experience (we non-sceptics speak of) but they have the theory (about what is going on with us non-sceptics). We non-Skeptics have the experiences but not the theory. .......... Oh! boy! Where's My pills!

If I have understood that correctly, then that's why we are all here on this forum - it's like two halves coming together.

Or am I just reading and thinking too much again?