In this chapter, I shall turn to the question of what level of learning Aristotle was trying to explain, and shall argue that, like Plato, he had little interest in developing an account of ordinary learning. Let me start, however, with two qualifications to this view. First, as in the previous chapter, the focus of this discussion is on cognitive learning. As Plato had done in the Republic, Aristotle does show an interest in the early stages of character formation, the education of the non-rational part of the soul. This was made clear in the previous chapter. What I am claiming, however, is that he shows little interest in articulating the earliest stages of cognitive development.

Second, I am only saying that Aristotle does not develop any detailed account of ordinary cognitive learning. I am not saying that he was completely silent on the issue or that we cannot get some clues as to how he would have tackled it. The point is that he did not make it an important problem in his epistemology. There are indeed hints scattered around some works like the De Anima about how our first concepts of universals are derived from particulars. Our earliest sense perceptions leave behind images, which can become memories. For the next stage we could take a leaf out of the De Memoria. At 450a1–15 Aristotle describes a process of contemplating the image of a triangle, but in such a way that one does not see it as having any particular size, and attending to only general characteristics. A similar process of abstraction could apply to images of e.g. man.