Week 2 - Aristotle Flashcards
Socrates to Plato (nothing written). From Plato to Aristotle (lots written). He was Plato’s star pupil
Socrates was a great talker, Plato was a superb writer, and Aristotle was interested in everything.
Philosophical achievement of tremendous range and complexity: fundamental work in logic and all the sciences of his day.
Aristotle was sent to Athens to be educated, and at the age of 17 became one of the pupils at Plato’s Academy.
He set up his own school in Athens called the Lyceum, after working as a tutor to Alexander the Great.
Regarded as “the” authority for hundreds of years during the Middle Ages.
He saw philosophy as an ongoing attempt to attend to all the complexities of human experience.
Plato says “there is reality above and beyond experience”. Aristotle says that ordinary experience is wonderful in itself or in its own right. We do not need to go beyond it. We can never go coherently behind our experience.
He claims that philosophy must confine itself to experience.
What is completely external cannot enter into our discourse and thought ad thus cannot be anything to us at all.
Aristotle criticises ‘Plato’s Forms’ - we cannot refer to pure ‘unattached whiteness’.
He does not make a sharp distinction between science and philosophy.
He was the first major western thinker to map out the separate sciences.
We have fundamental work in logic and biology, where his contribution was unmatched for a thousand years.
We also have work on the general foundations of scientific explanation; work in general philosophy of nature; work in metaphysics, including the questions of substance, identity and continuity; work on life and the mental faculties. Finally we have terrific work in ethics and political theory, and work in rhetoric and the theory of literature.
Over this incomparable range, he was regarded as the authority for hundreds of years during the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas used to refer to him simply as ‘the philosopher’.
Plato vs Aristotle
Plato imagines the philosopher’s mind walking to the rim of the universe and staring beyond at a transcendent reality that’s above and beyond our experience.
Aristotle say 2 things about this:
1/ Our ordinary experience is an object of tremendous wonder, richness and beauty in its own right. We do not need to go beyond it in order to find somethings that’s worth doing philosophy about.
2/ We can never coherently go beyond our experience. We can only investigate/map the sphere of our experience. He claims that philosophy must confine itself to experience.
Aristotle criticises Plato’s Forms - he said it’s meaningless, nonsense talk.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle makes the Form something immanent to the particular. It does not exist as a thing apart from that particular perceptible dog in some heavenly realm of dogness.
Aristotelian Forms are individuals. They are particulars and not universals.
Aristotle does not make a sharp distinction between science and philosophy.
The best of Aristotle’s arguments against materialism are devastating. He argues, notably with the context of philosophy of mind, but also in general metaphysics, by developing theories of identity and substance, which show that material reductionism is hard to justify.
Aristotle describes and argues for the four causes in his books Physics and Metaphysics as a part of developing his philosophy of substance.
He claims that there are four causes (or explanations) needed to explain change in the world. A complete explanation of any material change will use all four causes. These causes are material, formal, efficient and final.
The material cause is what something is made out of. It also explains the general sort of properties of something. Wooden boxes burn because they are made out of wood. The human body needs oxygen because its cells need oxygen.
The formal cause is what makes a thing one thing rather than many things. The human body is human, wooden boxes are boxes, and computers are computers.
The efficient cause is what did that. If a ball broke a window, then the ball is the efficient cause of the window breaking. Every change is caused by an efficient cause. If your eye sees, then it sees because light from the object strikes your eyes and causes you to see what is there. Efficient causes answer the what did that question, but do not answer how it was done.
The final cause is why efficient causes do what they do and why formal causes do what they do. Why do balls break windows? The final cause says that because balls are hard and windows are brittle, they break. Why do rocks fall? Aristotle said that rocks fall because they are heavy. Air is light, therefore air rises. These are all pointing out the final cause of efficient causes.
Aristotle believes that the animating principle in living things is the form of a living body that’s potentially organised so as to function the exercise the functions of life.
He is saying the essence of an object is its function i.e. what it does.
He tries to show us why a materialistic reductionism that says that perception is simply a material process of a certain sort must be inadequate to explain the complex functional characteristics of life - due to issue of intentionality.
Intentionality is defined as the ability for matter in our minds to “represent” or “be about” other things.
Take the following example: when I’m thinking of my grandmother in Utah, I take it for granted that the neurons in my brain that are activated when thinking of my grandmother are somehow “pointed at” or represent an actual being who lives in Utah.
However, this is a major problem because materialism states that neurons are just neurons, with the properties of neurons, and can’t be “about” anything outside of them. Yet, as we interact with the world, we take it for granted that all our thoughts seem to be “directed at” an actual external world.
On ethics, Aristotle asks ‘What is it to lead a good human life?’
He has a rich sense of what morality consists in, and this differentiates him sharply from some other famous moral philosophers. He refuses to reduce the many things of value to one single measure (like say Utilitarianism).
The ethical judge should not take a simple and inflexible set of rules into the complexities of a practical situation.
Aristotle argued that we don’t control our own moral environment, and therefore we cannot be, as Stoics wanted us to be, self-contained moral entities.
In his early work, the Categories, he distinguishes 2 sorts of properties, the ones that are ‘in’ the subject e.g. brown hair and the ones that reveal the being - the ‘what-is-it’ of the subject.
Materials cannot be ‘what-it-is’ to be you.
There are 3 reasons for this:
- Matter is always changing
- Conception of an artefact remains the same so long as its functional structure stays the same
- Matter is just a lump of stuff
Unlike Plato, Aristotle makes the Form something immanent to the particular. It does not exist as a thing apart from that particular perceptible dog in some heavenly realm of dogness.
The best of Aristotle’s arguments against materialism are devastating.
The essence of an axe is what is does (its function). Materialistic reductionism is inadequate.
Happiness for Aristotle wasn’t a matter of short-term joy. He thought children could not be happy.
True happiness he argued required a longer life.
Aristotle didn’t believe that the best way to live was to go and seek pleasure. That on its own would not be a good life. Instead, he used the word ‘eudaimonia’, translated as flourishing or success rather than happiness.
Eudaimonia is not about fleeting moments of bliss or how you feel. It can also be affected after your dead e.g. your child falling seriously ill.
The best kind of life for a human being was one that used our powers of reason.
To increase our chances of eudaemonia we must develop the right kind of character. The best way to develop good habits is to practise them from an early age.
Many modern philosophers believe that he was right about the importance of developing the virtues. Instead of looking to increase our pleasure in life, they think, we should try to become better people and do the right thing. That is what makes a life go well.
Aristotle was not just interested in individual personal development. Human beings are political animals, he argued. Eudaimonia can only be achieved in relation to a life in society.
One unfortunate side effect of his brilliance was that his views became accepted as unquestionably true. This is what is sometimes known as ‘truth by authority’.
However, authority does not prove anything by itself.
