Verità instabili. L'eikos in Aristotele

This paper deals with the Aristotelian concept of eikos, traditionally translated as “probability” or “likelihood", with the aim of showing the complexity and the theoretical worth of this notion. Eikos has already been an important concept in fields such as historiography and rhetoric and it plays a crucial role in Aristotelian thought, as well. According to Aristotle, eikos does not oppose itself to truth nor is it a second-level knowledge. Instead, it is a heuristic device that is extremely useful in conditions of uncertainty. Aristotle’s task was to offer a personal elaboration of a concept that already had a rich background and was suited to become a means for reflection on a crucial philosophical question — that of the verification of the truth in problematic situations.