The Principle of Non-Contradiction as the Fundamental Criterion of Rationality in Aristotle

As has become clear from several aspects by now, the basic conviction that destroys the faith in the possibility of recognizing the substance of something, to say nothing of an “ontological order,” is the conviction that only the world of individual objects is accessible to our cognition. Thus, while we can represent their properties to us as representational features, their substantial being in itself is only objectifiable in concepts that we ourselves construct. For, what is thought to be “really” given to thought is merely a plurality of ever new forms of appearances. The recognizably identical unity of these diverse “data,” in contrast, is held to be merely a function of thought's particular unifying perspective. Consequently, the “essence” of something cannot at all be grasped in itself. The reconstruction and disclosure of the way this unifying perspective comes to be alone guarantees a certain intersubjective validity in the cognition of things. An object of cognition is only understood through an analysis of the processual conditions from which it emerged or under which it is “constituted.”

As I have attempted to show, the solution to this epistemological problem (or, more precisely, the attempt to approach the solution to the degree possible) stands in its historical origins — directly, indirectly, and in terms of the matter itself — in direct opposition to the Aristotelian distinction between a cognition that grasps what is “earlier for us” and a cognition that grasps (conceptually) what is “earlier in terms of the matter or the nature [of the thing].”