BIOGRAPHY
Aristotle was born in Stagira, on the border of Macedonia. His mother,
Phaestis, was from a family of doctors, and his father, Nicomachus, was
the court physician to the king of Macedonia. At seventeen Aristotle was
sent to Athens.
There he studied in Plato's
Academy for two decades, but, as he later wrote, he loved the truth more
than he loved Plato,
and so he had no mind to remain a mere disciple. In 347, after Plato's
death, he left Athens
and spent the next four years conducting zoological investigations on
the islands of Assos and Lesbos.
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| Mosaic of Alexander the Great (356-323) from Pompeii. |
However, the connection to Alexander proved a liability in the end. On Alexander's death in 323 B.C., the Athenians went on a rampage against any or all associated with him. Indicted on charges of impiety, Aristotle fled Athens, "lest," as he put it, "the Athenians sin twice against philosophy" (referring, of course, to the unjust trial and death of Socrates). Aristotle died a year later. A popular but again highly questionable story says he drowned investigating marine life.
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| The Conquests of Alexander the Great (click on map for detail). |
There is no doubt that after Plato, Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of all time. In the early Middle Ages his thought was preserved and commented upon by the great Arab philosophers. He dominated later medieval philosophy to such an extent that St. Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as philosophus, "the philosopher." Logic, as taught until about the time of the Second World War, was essentially Aristotle's logic. His Poetics is still a classic of literary criticism, and his dicta on tragedy are widely accepted even today. Criticism of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological views has spread ever since Bacon and Descartes inaugurated modern philosophy; but for all that, the problems Aristotle saw, the distinctions he introduced, and the terms he defined are still central in many, if not most, philosophical discussions. His influence and prestige, like Plato's, are international and beyond all schools.
Aristotle found Plato's theory of Forms unacceptable. Like Plato, he wanted to discover universals, but he did not believe they existed apart from particulars. The form of a chair, for instance, can be thought of apart from the matter out of which the chair is made, but the form does not subsist as a separate invisible entity. The universal of "chairness" exists only in particular chairs--there is no other-worldly "Form of Chairness." Accordingly, Aristotle began his philosophy not with reflection on or dialogue about eternal Forms but with observations of particular objects.
In observing the world, Aristotle saw four "causes" that are responsible for making an object what it is: the material, formal, efficient, and final. In the case of a chair, for example, the chair's material cause would be its wood and cloth, its formal cause would be the structure or form given in its plan or blueprint, its efficient cause would be the worker who made it, and its final cause would be sitting. The material cause, then, is that out of which a thing is made, the formal cause is that into which a thing is made, the efficient cause is that by which a thing is made, and the final cause is that for which a thing is made. It is the last of these, the final cause, that Aristotle held to be most important, for it determined the other three. The goal or end (telos in Greek), the final cause, of any given substance is the key to its understanding. This means that all nature is to be understood in terms of final causes or purposes. This is known as a "teleological" explanation of reality.
As Aristotle applied these insights to human beings, he asked what the telos of a person could be. By observing what is unique to persons and what they, in fact, do seek, Aristotle came to the conclusion that the highest good or end for humans is eudaimonia. While this word is generally translated as "happiness," one must be careful to acknowledge that Aristotle's understanding of "happiness" is rather different from ours. Eudaimonia happiness is not a feeling of euphoria--in fact, it is not a feeling at all. It is rather "activity in accordance with virtue."
Aristotle's works lack the literary grace of Plato's. Like Plato, Aristotle is said to have written popular dialogues--the "exoteric" writings intended for those who were not students at the Lyceum--but they have not survived. What we have instead are the difficult "esoteric" works: lecture notes for classes at school. According to some scholars, these are not even Aristotle's notes, but the notes of students collected by editors. In any case, the writings as we have them contain much overlapping, repetition, and apparent contradiction.
Among Aristotle's major works, On Interpretation (De Interpretatione) presents Aristotle's philosophy of language. He analyzes the structure of sentences which express propositions and presents a famous puzzle about the present truth-value of propositions concerning future events. This material has been the subject of much recent debate by such thinkers as Heidegger and Derrida.
The Posterior Analytics, which deals with the forms of argument and inquiry, is divided into two books. Book I includes material on the nature of knowledge, demonstration, and truth and defines several key terms. Book II considers the four possible forms of inquiry and explains how the individual mind comes to know the basic truths.
Books I and II of the Physics deal with some of the main questions of physical science. After establishing the nature of first principles, Aristotle uses actuality and potentiality to explain being and change. And making a distinction between physics and mathematics, he discusses the four causes.
The Metaphysics probably consists of several independent treatises. Book I (Alpha) of this collection develops Aristotle's four causes and reviews the history of philosophy to his time. Book XII (Lambda) employs many of the concepts previously introduced, such as substance, actuality, and potency, and then moves to Aristotle's theology of the Unmoved Mover. The work concludes with Aristotle's rejection of Platonic Forms as separate, mathematical entities. Apparently Aristotle was responding to Plato's successors who emphasized the mathematical nature of the Forms.
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| Metope from the top of the Parthenon. According to Greek myth, the Lapiths invited the Centaurs to a wedding feast. Upon seeing the beauty of the Lapith bride, the Centaurs succumbed to their animal instincts of lust and a brawl resulted. The image is a symbolic lesson in its appeal for human reason over the lower animal instincts--a lesson taught by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics |
By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume I