Aristotle

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Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384–March 7 322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover a wide array of topics, including metaphysics, physics, meteorology, zoology, botany, logic, rhetoric, poetry, ethics, politics, and government. His combined works practically constitute an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge.


Aristotle, with Plato and Socrates, was among the most influential of the ancient Greek philosophers. They took Presocratic philosophy, which was fragmented and often vague, and created the first very large, detailed, systematic, and rationally-defended systems of thought. Aristotle's system of thought, in particular, is surely one of the widest-ranging in history. In addition, Plato and Aristotle founded two of the most important schools of ancient philosophy.

Although Aristotle wrote dialogues early in his career, only fragments of these have survived. The works of Aristotle that exist today are in treatise form and were mostly unpublished texts, generally thought to be lecture notes or texts used by his students. Among the most important are Physics, Metaphysics (or Ontology), Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics. These works, although connected in many fundamental ways, differ significantly in both style and substance.

Biography

Early life and studies at the Academy

Aristotle was born in a colony of Andros on the Macedonian peninsula of Chalcidice in 384 BCE. His father, Nicomachus, was court physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon; it is believed that Aristotle's ancestors held this position under various kings of the Macedons. Little is known of his mother, Phaestis; she died while Aristotle was very young. When Nicomachus also died, in Aristotle's tenth year, he was placed under the guardianship of his uncle, Proxenus of Atarneus, who taught Aristotle Greek, rhetoric, and poetry (O'Connor et al., 2004). Aristotle also attended Plato's school for young Greek aristocracy, and became Plato's favourite student. Aristotle was also influenced by his father's medical knowledge; when he went to Athens at the age of eighteen, he was probably already trained in the investigation of natural phenomena.

From the age of eighteen to thirty-seven, Aristotle remained in Athens as a pupil of Plato. The relations between Plato and Aristotle have been the subject of various legends, many of which depict Aristotle unfavourably. No doubt there were divergences of opinion between Plato, who took his stand on sublime, idealistic principles, and Aristotle, who even then preferred investigating the facts and laws of the physical world. It is also probable that Plato suggested that Aristotle needed restraining rather than encouragement, but Aristotle's conduct after the death of Plato, his continued association with Xenocrates and other Platonists, and his allusions in his writings to Plato's doctrines indicate that while there were differences of opinion between Plato and Aristotle, there was cordial appreciation and mutual forbearance.

Aristotle as philosopher and tutor

After Plato's death in 347 BCE, Aristotle was considered as the next head of the Academy, but the position went instead to Plato's nephew. Aristotle then went with Xenocrates to the court of Hermias, ruler of Atarneus in Asia Minor, married his niece, Pythias, and with her had a daughter (also named Pythias). In 344 BCE, Hermias was murdered, and Aristotle went with his family to Mytilene. It is reported that he stopped on Lesbos and briefly conducted biological research. One or two years later, he was summoned to Pella, the Macedonian capital, by King Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor of Alexander the Great, who was then thirteen.

Plutarch wrote that Aristotle imparted to Alexander a knowledge of ethics and politics, and the 'most profound secrets' of philosophy. Alexander provided Aristotle with ample means to acquire books and to pursue his scientific investigations. It is possible that Aristotle also participated in the education of Alexander's boyhood friends, who included Hephaestion and Harpalus. Aristotle maintained a long correspondence with Hephaestion, eventually collected into a book, unfortunately now lost.

According to Plutarch and Diogenes, Philip had Aristotle's hometown of Stageira burned during the 340s BCE, and Aristotle successfully requested that Alexander rebuild it. During his tutorship of Alexander, Aristotle was reportedly considered a second time for leadership of the Academy; his companion Xenocrates was selected instead.

Founder and master of the Lyceum

In about 335 BCE, Alexander departed for his Asiatic campaign, and Aristotle, who had been his informal adviser since Alexander ascended the Macedonian throne, returned to Athens and opened his own school of philosophy. He may, as Aulus Gellius says, have conducted a school of rhetoric during his former residence in Athens; but now, following Plato's example, he gave regular instruction in philosophy in a gymnasium dedicated to Apollo Lyceios, from which his school came to be known as the Lyceum. (It was also called the Peripatetic School because Aristotle preferred to discuss problems of philosophy with his pupils while walking around (peripateo) the shaded walks (peripatoi) around the gymnasium.)

Aristotle composed most of his writings in the thirteen years (335–322 BCE) that he spent as teacher of the Lyceum. Imitating Plato, he wrote Dialogues in which his doctrines were expounded in somewhat popular language. He also composed treatises on physics, metaphysics in which the exposition is more didactic and the language more technical than in the Dialogues. These writings brought together the works of his predecessors in Greek philosophy, and how he pursued his investigations of natural phenomena. Pliny the Elder claimed that Alexander placed under Aristotle's orders all the hunters, fishermen, and fowlers of the royal kingdom and all the overseers of the royal forests, lakes, ponds and cattle-ranges. Aristotle was fully informed about the doctrines of his predecessors, and Strabo asserted that he was the first to accumulate a great library.

In the last years of his life, relations between Aristotle and Alexander were strained, owing to the disgrace and punishment of Callisthenes, whom Aristotle had recommended to Alexander. Nevertheless, Aristotle continued to be regarded as a friend of Alexander and a representative of Macedonia. Consequently, when Alexander's death became known in Athens, and the outbreak occurred which led to the Lamian war, Aristotle shared in the general unpopularity of the Macedonians. The charge of impiety, which had been brought against Anaxagoras and Socrates, was now brought against Aristotle. He left the city, saying, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy" (Vita Marciana 41). He took up residence at his country house at Chalcis, in Euboea, and died there the following year, 322 BCE. His death was due to a disease, reportedly 'of the stomach', from which he had long suffered; the story that his death was due to hemlock poisoning, as well as the legend that he threw himself into the sea "because he could not explain the tides," are without historical foundation.

Aristotle's legacy had a profound influence on Islamic thought and philosophy during the Middle Ages. Muslim thinkers such as Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi[1] were some of the major proponents of the Aristotelian school of thought during the Golden Age of Islam.

Methodology

Aristotle defined his philosophy as "the science of the universal essence of that which is actual", in contrast to Plato's definition of it as the 'science of the idea', the unconditional basis of phenomena. Both regarded philosophy as concerned with the universal, but Aristotle found the universal in particular things, and called it the essence of things, while Plato held that the universal exists apart from particular things, and is related to them as their prototype or exemplar. For Aristotle, philosophical method implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the knowledge of essences, while for Plato it means the descent from a knowledge of universal ideas to a contemplation of particular imitations of those ideas. In a sense, Aristotle's method is both inductive and deductive, while Plato's is deductive from a priori principles.

For Aristotle, "natural philosophy" corresponded to the phenomena of the natural world, including motion, light, and the laws of physics. Many centuries later, these subjects would become the basis of modern science, and the term "philosophy" has come to be narrowly understood as metaphysics, distinct from empirical study of the natural world. However, for Aristotle, philosophy encompassed all facets of intellectual inquiry, and he made philosophy coextensive with reasoning, which he also called 'science'. His use of the term "science" has a different meaning to that which is covered by the scientific method: "All science (dianoia) is either practical, poetical or theoretical". By "practical" science, he meant ethics and politics; by "poetical", he means the study of poetry and the other fine arts; while by 'theoretical philosophy' he meant physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, defined as "the knowledge of immaterial being", the "theological science", or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction". If logic, or, as Aristotle calls it, analytic, is regarded as a study preliminary to philosophy, we have as divisions of Aristotelian philosophy:

  1. Logic
  2. Theoretical philosophy, including metaphysics, physics, mathematics
  3. Practical philosophy
  4. Poetical philosophy

Aristotle's epistemology

Logic

Aristotle's conception of logic was the dominant form of logic until the advances in mathematical logic in the 19th century. Kant himself thought that Aristotle had done everything possible in terms of logic.


Analytics and the Organon

What we today call "Aristotelian logic", Aristotle himself would have called "analytics"; he reserved the term "logic" to mean "dialectics". His logical works were compiled into six books in about the early 1st century CE:

  1. Categories
  2. On Interpretation
  3. Prior Analytics
  4. Posterior Analytics
  5. Topics
  6. On Sophistical Refutations

The order of the books (or the teachings from which they are composed) is not certain, but this list was derived from analysis of Aristotle's writings. It goes from the basics, the analysis of simple terms in the Categories, to the study of more complex forms, namely, syllogisms (in the Analytics) and dialetics (in the Topics and Sophistical Refutations). There is one volume of Aristotle's concerning logic not found in the Organon, namely the fourth book of Metaphysics. (Bocheński, 1951).

Modal logic

Aristotle is also the creator of syllogisms with modalities (modal logic, concerning the modes of truth. Aristotle introduced the qualification of 'necessary' and 'possible' premises.

Science

Aristotelian discussions about science had only been qualitative, not quantitative. By the modern definition of the term, Aristotelian philosophy was not science, as this worldview did not attempt to probe how the world worked through experiment.

Aristotle's metaphysics

Causality

In Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics, Aristotle argued that all causes of things are beginnings; that we have scientific knowledge when we know the cause; and that to know a thing's existence is to know the reason for its existence. He set the guidelines for all subsequent causal theories by specifying the number, nature, principles, elements, varieties, and order of causes as well as the modes of causation. According to Aristotle, causes fall into several groups, which amount to the ways in which the question 'why' may be answered; namely by reference to the matter or the substratum; the essence, the pattern, the form, or the structure; the primary moving change or the agent and its action; the goal, the plan, the end, or the good. As a consequence, the four major kinds of causes are:

  1. The Material Cause is that from which a thing comes into existence (i.e., its parts, constituents, substratum or materials). This reduces the explanation of causes to the parts that comprise the whole system (the part-whole causation).
  2. The Formal Cause tells us what a thing is, that any thing is determined by the definition, form, pattern, essence, whole, synthesis, or archetype. It embraces the account of causes in terms of fundamental principles or general laws, as the whole (macrostructure) is the cause of its parts (the whole-part causation).
  3. The Efficient Cause is that from which the change or the ending of the change begins. It identifies "what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed" and so suggests all sorts of agents, nonliving or living, acting as the sources of change or movement or rest. This covers the modern definitions of 'cause' as either the agent or agency or particular events or states of affairs.
  4. The Final Cause is that for the sake of which a thing exists or is done, including both purposeful and instrumental actions and activities. The final cause or telos is the purpose that something serves, or that from which and to which the change is. This also covers modern ideas of mental causation involving such psychological causes as volition, need, motivation, or motives, rational, irrational and ethical, that give purpose to behavior.

Additionally, things can be causes of one another, causing each other reciprocally, as hard work causes fitness and vice versa, although not in the same way or function, the one is as the beginning of change, the other as the goal. Thus Aristotle first suggested a reciprocal or circular causality as a relation of mutual dependence or action or influence of cause and effect. Also, Aristotle indicated that the same thing can be the cause of contrary effects, its presence and absence may result in different outcomes.

Aristotle marked two modes of causation: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. All causes, proper and incidental, can be spoken as potential or as actual, particular or generic. The same language refers to the effects of causes, so that generic effects are assigned to generic causes, particular effects to particular causes, operating causes to actual effects. Essentially, causality does not suggest a temporal relation between cause and effect.

All further investigations of causality will be consisting in imposing the favorite hierarchies on the order causes, like as final > efficient> material > formal (Thomas Aquinas), or in restricting all causality to the material and efficient causes or to the efficient causality (deterministic or chance) or just to regular sequences and correlations of natural phenomena (the natural sciences describing how things happen instead of explaining the whys and wherefores).


Substance, potentiality, and actuality

Aristotle examines the concept of substance (ousia) in his Metaphysics, Book VII and he concludes that a particular substance is a combination of both matter and form. As he proceeds to the book VIII, he concludes that the matter of the substance is the substratum or the stuff of which is composed e.g. the matter of the house are the bricks, stones, timbers etc., or whatever constitutes the potential house. While the form of the substance, is the actual house, namely "covering for bodies and chattels" or any other differentia. The formula that gives the components is the account of the matter, and the formula that gives the differentia is the account of the form (Metaphysics VIII, 1043a 10-30).

With regard to change (kinesis) and its causes now, as he defines in his Physics and On Generation and Corruption, he distinguishes the coming to be from

  1. growth and diminution, (change in quantity)
  2. locomotion, (change in space) and
  3. alteration, (change in quality).

The coming to be is a change where nothing persists of which the resultant is property. In that particular change he introduces the concept of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (entelecheia) in association with the matter and the form.

Referring to potentiality, is what a thing is capable of doing, or being acted upon, if it is not prevented from something else. For example, a seed of a plant in the soil is potentially (dynamei) plant, and if is not prevented by something, it will become a plant. Potentially beings can either "act" (poiein) or "be acted upon" (paschein), as well as can be either innate or come by practice or learning. For example, the eyes possess the potentiality of sight (innate - being acted upon), while the capability of playing the flute can be possessed by learning (exercise, acting).

Referring now to actuality, this is the fulfillment of the end of the potentiality. Because the end (telos) is the principle of every change, and for the sake of the end exists potentiality, therefore actuality is the end. Referring then to our previous example, we could say that actuality is when the seed of the plant becomes a plant.

"For that for the sake of which a thing is, is its principle, and the becoming is for the sake of the end; and the actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potentiality is acquired. For animals do not see in order that they may have sight, but they have sight that they may see." (Aristotle, Metaphysics IX 1050a 5-10).

In conclusion, the matter of the house is its potentiality and the form is its actuality. The Formal Cause (aitia) then of that change from potential to actual house, is the reason (logos) of the house builder and the Final Cause is the end, namely the house itself. Then Aristotle proceeds and concludes that the actuality is prior to potentiality in formula, in time and in substantiality.

With this definition of the particular substance (matter and form) Aristotle tries to solve the problem of the unity of the beings; e.g., what is that makes the man one? Since, according to Plato there are two Ideas: animal and biped, how then is man a unity? However, according to Aristotle, the potential being (matter) and the actual one (form) are one and the same thing. (Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII 1045a-b).

Aristotle's ethics

Although Aristotle wrote several works on ethics, the major one was the Nicomachean Ethics, which is considered one of his greatest works; it discusses virtues. The ten books which comprise it are based on notes from his lectures at the Lyceum and were either edited by or dedicated to his son, Nicomachus. Aristotle believed that ethical knowledge is not certain knowledge, like metaphysics and epistemology, but general knowledge. Also, as it is a practical discipline rather than a theoretical one; he thought that to be "good", one could not simply study what virtue is; one must actually do virtuous deeds. To do this, he had first to establish what was virtuous, and he began by determining that everything was done with some goal in mind and that goal is good. The ultimate goal he called the Highest Good.

Aristotle contended that happiness could not be found only in pleasure or only in fame and honor. He finally finds happiness "by ascertaining the specific function of man". But what is this function that will bring happiness? To determine this, Aristotle analyzed the soul and found it to have three parts: the Nutritive Soul (plants, animals and humans), the Perceptive Soul (animals and humans) and the Rational Soul (humans only). Thus, a human's function is to do what makes it human, to be good at what sets it apart from everything else: the ability to reason. A person that does this is the happiest because they are fulfilling their purpose or nature as found in the rational soul. Depending on how well they did this, Aristotle said people belonged to one of four categories: the Virtuous, the Continent, the Incontinent and the Vicious.

Aristotle believed that every ethical virtue is an intermediate condition between excess and deficiency. However, this does not mean that he believed in moral relativism; he considered some emotions (e.g., hate, envy, jealousy, spite.) and some actions (e.g., adultery, theft, murderas to be always wrong, regardless of circumstances. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle often focused on how to find the mean between two extremes; for example; too much courage leads to ignorant choices, and too little would be cowardice. Aristotle says that finding this middle ground is essential to reaching eudemonia, the ultimate form of godlike consciousness. This middle ground is often referred to as The Golden Mean. Aristotle also wrote about justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, defining General justice as a universal justice that can only exist in a perfect society, and Particular justice as where punishment is given out for a particular crime. Aristotle says an educated judge is needed to apply just decisions regarding any particular case. This is where we get the concept of he scales of justice, the blindfolded judge symbolizing blind justice, balancing the scales, weighing all the evidence and deliberating each particular case individually. Homonymy is an important theme in Aristotle’s justice because one form of justice can apply to one, while another would be best suited for a different person/case. Aristotle says that developing good habits can make a good human being and that practicing the use of The golden mean when applicable to virtues will allow a human being to live a healthy, happy life.

The loss of his works

Although we know that Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), the originals have been lost. All that we have now are the literary notes of his pupils, which are often difficult to read (the Nicomachean Ethics is a good example). It is now believed that we have about one fifth of his original works.

Aristotle never published his books, only his dialogues. The story of the original manuscripts of his treatises is described by Strabo in his Geography and Plutarch in his "Parallel Lives, Sulla": The manuscripts were left from Aristotle to Theophrastus, from Theophrastus to Neleus of Scepsis, from Neleus to his heirs. Their descendants sold them to Apellicon of Teos. When Lucius Cornelius Sulla occupied Athens in 86 BCE, he carried off the library of Appellicon to Rome, where they were first published in 60 BCE from the grammarian Tyrranion of Amisus and then by philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes.

Bibliography

Note: Bekker numbers are often used to uniquely identify passages of Aristotle. They are identified below where available.

Major works

The extant works of Aristotle are broken down according to the five categories in the Corpus Aristotelicum. Some, such as the Athenaion Politeia or the fragments of other politeia are generally regarded as products of Aristotle's "school", compiled under his direction. Others, including On Colours may have been written by Aristotle's successors at the Lyceum, e.g., Theophrastus and Straton. Still others acquired Aristotle's name through similarities in doctrine or content, such as the De Plantis, possibly by Nicolaus of Damascus. A final category, omitted here, includes medieval palmistries, astrological and magical texts whose connection to Aristotle is purely conjectural. Those that are seriously disputed are marked with an asterisk.

Logical writings

Physical and scientific writings

Metaphysical writings

Ethical writings

Aesthetic writings

  • (1354a) Rhetoric (or Ars Rhetorica, or The Art of Rhetoric or Treatise on Rhetoric)
  • Rhetoric to Alexander (or Rhetorica ad Alexandrum) *
  • (1447a) Poetics (or Ars Poetica); (first book only; second book on Comedy since lost)

A work outside the Corpus Aristotelicum

Specific editions


Notes

  1. ↑ http://www.ummah.net/history/scholars/KINDI.html

See also

External links

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