Aristotle

And finally, here's Aristotle, I kept my word!

·         At 18 Aristotle came to Athens and became a pupil of Plato, this was until Plato’s death.

·         He thought that no state would have as many as one hundred thousand citizens and preached the golden mean, which shall be explained later.

·         At the death of Alexander, the Athenians rebelled and turned on his friends, which included Aristotle who was charged with impiety, just as Socrates had been before him. Unlike Socrates however, Aristotle fled to avoid punishment.

·         Aristotle was the first philosopher to write like a professor and he comes across as a teacher rather than a prophet.

Metaphysics

·         Aristotle’s metaphysics may be described as Plato diluted by common sense.

·         He believed there should be names for certain things but these must be the proper names. Everything is made up of universal substance, he said that a universal couldn’t exist by itself but only in particular things. For example, there could be no such thing as parenthood if there were no such things as parents. Here however there is almost the problem of over-simplification and over generalisation. Though parenthood couldn’t exist without parents, the rule cannot be applied to everything.

·         He believed there must be different classes of word/description. For example, “John is wise, James is foolish, John is taller than James”

·         Here John and James are proper names, foolish and taller are universals. This in turn can be applied to his theory of naming substances.

·         The next most important term in Aristotle’s metaphysics is essence. Your essence is what you are by your very nature, something that you cannot loose without losing yourself.

·         Next is the distinction between form and matter, if a man makes a bronze sphere then bronze is the matter and the sphere is the form. He goes onto say that the form makes it one definite thing, for example a marble statue is definitely a statue because it has been shaped so, were it not shaped it’d simply be marble.

·         Aristotle links this to the argument of potentiality and actuality. Any marble has the potential to be a statue, form distinguishes potentiality and actuality.

·         According to Aristotle there are three kinds of substance, the sensible perishable, those that are sensible but not perishable and those that are neither sensible nor perishable. The first includes plants and animals, the second includes the heavenly bodies and the third includes the rational soul in man and also god.

Ethics

·         Aristotle’s views on ethics represent the majority of the opinions of the educated and experienced men of his day.

·         The good is happiness which is an activity of the soul. He says there are two kinds of virtues, intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtues come from teaching, moral from habit. We become just by performing just acts.

·         The doctrine of the Golden Mean

·         Every virtue is a mean between to extremes/vices. For example, courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness.

·         Aristotle thinks that justice involves not equality, but right proportion, which is only sometimes equality. This reflects the views of the aristocracy at the time.

·         It is possible to see slight communist leanings within this because it is all focused on the good of the community over the good of the one.

·         Aristotle had three views on pleasure.
1) That it is never good.
2) That some pleasure is good, but most is bad.
3) That pleasure is good, but not the best.

·         He however rejects the first view under the assumption that since pain is bad, pleasure must therefore be good.

Politics

·         Aristotle’s politics is both interesting and important, interesting because it shows the common prejudices of the day and important because they are the source of many principles which remained influential until the end of the Middle Ages.

·         He points out that importance of the state because it is the highest form of community. He believed that slavery was bad but only if the slaves were Greek, as he viewed non-Greeks as inferior. This is similar to his views on warfare, believing it to be just if it was waged against man who, by nature, were intended to be governed.

·         Plato’s utopia is criticised by Aristotle in many ways, a few examples are him saying that it gives too much unity to the state and makes it into an individual rather than a community.

·         He also criticises the communist ideals in Plato’s work insofar as he views Plato’s condemnation of private property as ridiculous because private property inspires virtues such as benevolence and generosity.

·         He believed that the aim of the state is to produce cultured gentlemen who combine the aristocratic mentality with the love of learning and the arts.

Logic

·         Most important work in logic is the doctrine of the syllogism, an argument consisting of three parts, a major premise, a secondary premise and a conclusion.

·         There are a number of different kinds of syllogism, ‘Barbara’ ‘Celarent’ ‘Darii’ and ‘Ferio’

·         The system is however open to three kinds of criticism,
1) Formal defects within the system itself.
2) Over-estimation of the syllogism, as compared to other forms of deductive argument.
3) Over-estimation of deduction as a form of argument.