ARISTOTLE THE REALIST

(384-322 BC) "Every realm of nature is marvellous."

Overview Aristotle was a materialist philosopher who developed Ethics and Logic as newly important elements of philosophy and whose thought had the most profound effect on medieval scholars. Aristotle undertook objective, scientific study of all major fields of knowledge: logic, physics, natural history, politics, ethics and the arts. He also gave an account of what he termed the First Philosophy, metaphysics, the science of being, which underlay all sciences and was thus primary. For Aristotle, the essence of being was not perfection but change. Everything has a potential and a goal or end towards which it progresses. Man is a "political animal" who best fulfills his potential and natural end within a society with laws and customs. His highest goal is the "good life", not a life of ease, but a life of virtue which results in "eudaimonia" , or having a good spirit, often translated as happiness. Ultimate happiness lies in pursuit of wisdom for its own sake. At a cosmic level, Aristotle conceived of an "Unmoved Mover", an initiator of all motion but perfect and unchanging itself. This is the final end towards which all things are drawn. To the medieval scholastics this was God. Man MAN A THINKING ANIMAL Man fits into the scheme of nature as a "thinking animal". The mind, that which distinguished man as a rational being, is "incapable of being of being destroyed." It is a special part of the psyche or soul which in turn is the animating force of the body. The soul is the body's "form", and unlike Plato's soul, does not have an existence separate from the body. Thus it does not survive the death of the body. Yet it possesses both actuality and potentiality, and is the efficient, formal and final cause of the body. That is, it has a goal or end, and carries within it the means to that end. MAN A POLITICAL ANIMAL Man is also a "political animal". By this, Aristotle means Man lives best in a "polis", the city-state form of the Greek state. That is, he is characterized by living within a society with laws and customs. Man best fulfills his potential and natural end within a social context. This is the "good life". This is not a life of ease, but a life of virtue which results in the highest good, eudaimonia, or having a good spirit, often translated as happiness. THE GOOD LIFE Aristotle's "Ethics" is a study of choice in action; how should man best live? For Aristotle, this has a social as well as individual aspect. Some virtues, like courage and generosity, he describes as "practical" virtues, because they relate to man's social nature. The truly balanced individual also pursues the "theoretical" virtues which are related to man as a rational being. Ultimate happiness lies in pursuit of wisdom for its own sake.

All is Revealed KNOWLEDGE THROUGH RESEARCH

All scientific truths are necessarily and universally true and deal with the general not the particular. Human knowledge of these scientific truths is based on repeated sense experiences which reason allows a universal to form in the mind." ("Posterior Analytics") Where Plato sought knowledge of an ideal world through reason, Aristotle applied logical reasoning to experience. For Aristotle, all life was permeated with meaning and his encyclopaedic mind undertook objective, scientific study of every major field of knowledge. The sheer breadth of the material encouraged him to be a systematiser, a classifier. Modern science and logic owe much to this side of his work. What Can we Know? Characteristic of all nature is movement and change. In the process, there is something that changes and something that stays the same i.e. any individual object has both substance and form or essence. It also has a present actuality, a past and the potential for future change. To explain how and why a thing is as it is, to understand its being, its reality, four kinds of aetia or causes must be considered:

a material cause - the matter of which it is composed a formal cause - the law or pattern that determines its development an efficient cause - the agent or initiator of the process a final cause - its end or result

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Platos theory of forms. As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinasreferred to him simply as The Philosopher. In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive. Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today. As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a formalized system for reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also guaranteed to be true. Aristotles brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later. Aristotles emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the scientific method forms the backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his work in ethics and politics, Aristotle identifies the highest good with intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates certain virtues based on reasoning. And in his work on psychology and the soul, Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which unifies and interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge. Aristotle famously rejected Platos theory of forms, which states that properties such as beauty are abstract universal entities that exist independent of the objects themselves. Instead, he argued that forms are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, and so must be studied in relation to them.

However, in discussing art, Aristotle seems to reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal form which artists attempt to capture in their work. Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in Athens, Greece; and he was an inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers from the Lyceum.

Philosophy of Nature Aristotle sees the universe as a scale lying between the two extremes: form without matter is on one end, and matter without form is on the other end. The passage of matter into form must be shown in its various stages in the world of nature. To do this is the object of Aristotles physics, or philosophy of nature. It is important to keep in mind that the passage from form to matter within nature is a movement towards ends or purposes. Everything in nature has its end and function, and nothing is without its purpose. Everywhere we find evidences of design and rational plan. No doctrine of physics can ignore the fundamental notions of motion, space, and time. Motion is the passage of matter into form, and it is of four kinds: (1) motion which affects the substance of a thing, particularly its beginning and its ending; (2) motion which brings about changes in quality; (3) motion which brings about changes in quantity, by increasing it and decreasing it; and (4) motion which brings about locomotion, or change of place. Of these the last is the most fundamental and important. Aristotle rejects the definition of space as the void. Empty space is an impossibility. Hence, too, he disagrees with the view of Plato and the Pythagoreans that the elements are composed of geometrical figures. Space is defined as the limit of the surrounding body towards what is surrounded. Time is defined as the measure of motion in regard to what is earlier and later. It thus depends for its existence upon motion. If there where no change in the universe, there would be no time. Since it is the measuring or counting of motion, it also depends for its existence on a counting mind. If there were no mind to count, there could be no time. As to the infinite divisibility of space and time, and the paradoxes proposed byZeno, Aristotle argues that space and time are potentially divisible ad infinitum, but are not actually so divided. After these preliminaries, Aristotle passes to the main subject of physics, the scale of being. The first thing to notice about this scale is that it is a scale of values. What is higher on the scale of being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced in it. Species on this scale are eternally fixed in their place, and cannot evolve over time. The higher items on the scale are also more organized. Further, the lower items are inorganic and the higher are organic. The principle which gives internal organization to the higher or organic items on the scale of being is life, or what he calls the soul of the organism. Even the human soul is nothing but the organization of the body. Plants are the lowest forms of life on the scale, and their souls contain a nutritive element by which it preserves itself. Animals are above plants on the scale, and their souls contain an appetitive feature which allows them to have sensations, desires, and thus gives them the ability to move. The scale of being proceeds from animals to humans. The human soul shares the nutritive element with plants, and the appetitive element with animals, but also has a rational element which is distinctively our own. The details of the appetitive and rational aspects of the soul are described in the following two sections.

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Aristotle 384-322 , Greek philosopher, b. Stagira. He is sometimes called the Stagirite. Life Aristotle's father, Nicomachus, was a noted physician. Aristotle studied (367-347 ) under Plato at the Academy and there wrote many dialogues that were praised for their eloquence. Only fragments of these dialogues are extant. He tutored (342-c.339 ) Alexander the Great at the Macedonian court, left to live in Stagira, and then returned to Athens. In 335 he opened a school in the Lyceum; some distinguished members of the Academy followed him. His practice of lecturing in the Lyceum's portico, or covered walking place (peripatos), gave his school the name Peripatetic. During the anti-Macedonian agitation after Alexander's death, Aristotle fled in 323 to Chalcis, where he died. Works Aristotle's extant writings consist largely of his written versions of his lectures; some passages appear to be interpolations of notes made by his students; the texts were edited and given their present form by Andronicus of Rhodes in the 1st cent. Chief among them are the Organum, consisting of six treatises on logic; Physics; Metaphysics; De Anima [on the soul]; Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics; De Poetica [poetics]; Rhetoric; and a series of works on biology and physics. In the late 19th cent. his Constitution of Athens, an account of Athenian government, was found. PhilosophyLogic and Metaphysics was the sequence that all logical thought follows. He introduced the notion of category into logic and taught that reality could be classified according to several categories-substance (the primary category), quality, quantity, relation, determination in time and space, action, passion or passivity, position, and condition.Aristotle also taught that knowledge of a thing, beyond its classification and description, requires an explanation of Aristotle placed great emphasis in his school on direct observation of nature, and in science he taught that theory must follow fact. He considered philosophy to be the discerning of the selfevident, changeless first principles that form the basis of all knowledge. Logic was for Aristotle the necessary tool of any inquiry, and the syllogism causality, or why it is. He posited four causes or principles of explanation: the material cause (the substance of which the thing is made); the formal cause (its design); the efficient cause (its maker or builder); and the final cause (its purpose or function). In modern thought the efficient cause is generally considered the central explanation of a thing, but for Aristotle the final cause had primacy.He used this account of causes to examine the relation of form to matter, and in his conclusions differed sharply from those of his teacher, Plato. Aristotle believed that a form, with the exception of the Prime Mover, or God, had no separate existence, but rather was immanent in matter. Thus, in the Aristotelian system, form and matter together constitute concrete individual realities; the Platonic system holds that a concrete reality partakes of a form (the ideal) but does not embody it. Aristotle believed that form caused matter to move and defined motion as the process by which the potentiality of matter (the thing itself) became the actuality of form (motion itself). He held that the Prime Mover alone was pure form and as the "unmoved mover" and final cause was the goal of all motion. Ethics and Other AspectsAristotle's ethical theory reflects his metaphysics. Following Plato, he argued that the goodness or virtue of a thing lay in the realization of its specific nature. The highest good for humans is the complete and habitual exercise of the specifically human function-rationality. Rationality is exercised through the practice of two kinds of virtue, moral and intellectual. Aristotle emphasized the traditional Greek notion of moral virtue as the mean between extremes. Well-being (eudaemonia) is the pursuit not of pleasure (hedonism) but rather of the Good, a composite ideal, consisting of contemplation (the intellectual life) and, subordinate to that, engagement in politics (the moral life). In the Politics, Aristotle holds that, by nature, humans form political associations, and he explores the best forms these may take. For Aristotle's aesthetic views, which are set forth in the Poetics, see tragedy. Aristotelianism After the decline of Rome, Aristotle's work was lost in the West. However, in the 9th cent., Arab scholars introduced Aristotle to Islam, and Muslim theology, philosophy, and natural science all took on an Aristotelian cast. It was largely through Arab and Jewish scholars that Aristotelian thought was reintroduced in the West. His works became the basis of medieval scholasticism; much of Roman Catholic theology shows, through St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian influence. There has also been a revival of Aristotelian influence on philosophy in the 20th cent. His teleological approach has continued to be central to biology, but it was banished from physics by the scientific revolution of the 17th cent. His work in astronomy, later elaborated by Ptolemy, was controverted by the investigations of Copernicus and Galileo.