Aristotelian Stories

Abstract

When it comes to science writing, narrative has attracted little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting a brief pilot survey on narrative in the Aristotelian Corpus. My main concern here is to understand the workings of narrative in the process of knowledge creation. Aristotle, apart from his paradigmatic role in the history of knowledge, offers a broad and varied corpus. The paper proceeds in three steps: After a few introductory remarks on the concept of ‘narrative’, I will give a brief overview of narrative in Aristotle. Then, there follow a few examples for the main epistemic functions of narrative in Aristotle. After that, five epistemic grand narratives, actually ‘stories’, told by Aristotle, demonstrate that he has a method of narrative construction, that is, of epistemic storytelling, which has been very successful. I attempt to cast this method in a poetics-style list of rules. The paper shows that Aristotle skillfully uses different forms of narrative in order to produce knowledge.