The very beginning is not that obvious. ”All men by nature desire to know”, something aristotle assumes and just states consensus. This is a principle that regards everybody.
There is also another principle that he does not further talk of in this text: the idea that nature never does anything in vein; or without purpose: if there is a natural desire to know, there must also be a possibility for knowledge to exist.
Miguel de Unamuno wrote his major work on the tragic meaning of life: at the core of this text, the human condition is a struggle between a desire that is within each of us, like being mortal or overcoming, and the knowledge that this cannot be the case: this defines human nature.
For Aristotle this sort of situation is not possible. If there is a natural desire, this indicates true possibilities.
Aristotle distinguishes between experience, art and reasoning. Logos and Techne, reasoning and the Arts. There is Logos in art but they are still somehow different. Logos is a universal judgement that can bring about a class of objects. At some point it is possible to have a universal judgement, but this will be more than experience, in the particular. Experience is usually the particular, action and production too, whilst the universal has to do with the consideration of experience, but not with the application of it.
This is why sometimes, a man of experience is more effective at applying knowledge, than a scientist of reasoning. The scientist knows universally what something is, but since applying these theories is always a matter of individual cases, he lacks the ability to deal with individual cases.
Experience is the umbrella term that keeps together sensible perception and the applicability of it.
Today we usually refer to five senses, but for Aristotle there are more than the ”external senses”, like the internal senses (such as the common sense, a sense that connects information from the external senses into one object, integrates them.)
If someone makes a noise, you don’t see that noise, but if you put together the totality that made up the noise, it is not the individual senses that does that, but an internal sense.
Aristotle distinguishes between memory and reminscence, passive and active memory. These are also internal senses.
There is a sort of ability in Aristotle, a basic reasoning, when an animal, like a goat or a sheep, sees a wolf and runs away, there is no articulated reasoning behind, but still a complex perception. First there is a perception of an image that is integrated into an external object that is recognised as a dangerous animal, and so there is a quick decision to flee. Experience here is a very complex notion, it is the ability of abstraction; though Aristotle himself does not entirely call this an abstraction, though it is implicit.
The Aristotelian commentator who actually finds this out though is Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Then there is reasoning. To fully understand this, when Aristotle writes these texts, he is no longer in the academy of Plato, we know that he has written many other works eg. the Ethics but also likely the physics, which is why he doesn’t really develop on the four causes here.
Lowest level of knower doesn’t know why we generalisable, how can things be as he knows they are? He is just generalising instances of things he has seen. So he is unable to explain why things are.
The artist is a higher level of knowledge, because he can actually teach, so he has knowledge of the causes.
However, the philosopher can teach both the artist and so on, he can teach everything because he is able to know the ultimate answer to the question why something happens. He knows the first principle of all reality.
The four causes according to Aristotle: Stanford encyclopedia by A. Falcon. Read later. Concise and clear. The four causes are four ways to answer to the question ”why?”. Whys are related to the purpose to which they aim, their teleology.
When I refer to the end of any action, I am looking for the final cause, which according to Aristotle is the highest of all kinds of explanation. It entails the other kinds of causes anyways.
The formal cause: what makes the action so and so.
A good philosopher should pay heed to all the causes; and so philosophy took its course in developing a clear understanding of the causes – such as Thales believing that material causes are all courses, whilst other like Empedocles have material and ** cause.
Pythagoreans follow almost only the formal causes, whilst Plato has the most sophisticated version of the causes, though not fully satisfactory.
Parmenides seems to not really fit the narrative.
They are four facets of One causal explanation, you have the see the four causes unitarily; so that you have a full way of explaining reality, the why.
Substance constitutes the first attribute of meaning. So when he refers to this, he means the primary way in how to refer to what is. Substantial is an adjective that indicates priority in the analogy of attribution. So substantial reality is the core of what you are talking about.
Aristotle presents what philosophy is in general for him: the teacher calls him somewhat phenomenological, he looks at things and speaks of what people generally say about them. He looks at what the considered wise ones have said, and things it is important because they are able to teach. Thus they are philosophers.
The first of the tacist assumptions he speaks of is the nobility of the sight, we enjoy seeing more than the other senses. In many cultures however this is not so obvious. This was something applicable only to the Greek culture.
The other assumption that Aristotle makes, which he doesn’t argue for, is that all human beings desire to know.
Sight, desire to know, and the one who can teach being superior to the ones who can’t, and the clear superiority of theoretical over practical disciplines. Anything that is useful for a practical purpose is by the very fact that it is practical, less noble than what is useless. Aristotle thinks this sort of principle that goes without saying. It reflects a certain aristocratic view but yet is very different from what the sophists thought. If you just know things for the sake of knowing it is empty.
Necessary = useful to life
Better = noble
These are quintessentially Aristotelian ideas but it is not out of itself really clear.
Philosophy is seen as the most human way to occupy free time; leisure time. Skol´e = leisure time; going to school is leisure time. In both Greek and Latin, business and commerce are referred to words that are constructed via negaitons; askolea meaning not-leisure-time. Leisure is the condition of the one who is truly free and indepedent.
In many of Plato’s dialogues, normal leisure is wasted time and the only noble way to deploy this time is to philosophise.
God to Aristotle means the first principle and has nothing to do with the Greek religion. Good and noble precisely because it is not connected to any idea of, let’s say: ”thanks to philosophy I know God and thus I can be better placed to take advantage of knowledge”, this is not true to Aristotle.
What is also appearing in §2 is the first referral to the history of philosophy. He makes a sort different assumption here, the historical origin of philosophy was ”wonder” thaumasey, a sort of religious fear, puzzlement. Wonder pushed people to become philosophers.
Wonder is a way of presenting things without giving a convincing explanation as to why they are so. The task of philosophy is to make wonder impossible. This is a sad note: the better the philosopher, the less they are able to wonder.
But Wonder is such a great condition; but Aristotle hates it. When having explained all causes, we no longer wonder at them; however when Baumgarten develops aestethics, the doctrine of beauty, these aestethics concern what we admire without knowing why.
(It makes no sense to speak like a romantic philosopher, ”if God were in front of me with two closed hands, one filled with true knowledge, and one filled with relentless pushing; Lessing chooses relentless research”; aristotle would’ve chosen true knowledge any minute of the day, he believes that it is technically possible to achieve full explanation of everything. In book Lambda, a full thought of thought, a full act of everything that is distuingisble is possible. He says that there is a sort of divine knowledge, and the more we indulge in it, the closer we get to divinity.)
Endoxa: in his first work of the Organon, the Topics, he says that we have a demonstration when we know the principle. Demonstrative proof. In many areas of life we cannot demonstrate everything through a principle, because the reality in itself can be variable and contingent, like medicine; it can never be based on necessary demonstration, the human body is characterised by movement and alterations of too many things. The single case is always a case by itself and not influenced by statistics. We have to use reason in a responsible way, in the way of dialectics: the reasoning which is based on principles that are taken as if they were necessary, even though we know they are not. It is probable thinking that reaches some conclusion that is reasonable. But they can change in how we interpret principles differently. Like politics for example. Endoxa are those principles which we use as ”probable principles”, positions in a given society that most people do not really doubt. Thus if I move somewhere else, the endoxa can change drastically. So eg. the superiority of sight, and therefore the superiority of some arts over others. Or the fact that what is theoretical size is superior to the applied version.
Remember that Aristotle’s defense of first principles, like PNC, this is a dialectic argument, not a demonstrable.
Literature and theatre are sources of knowledge, given that our experience might not include for example warfare, so we need to learn of it indirectly.
For Aristotle, mathematics cannot have any faults, but in practice it does, but this does not make sense to Aristotle given his idea of Greek superiority. Now a days however, there is an approach in which we rather try to reduce the wrongness of the approximations, rather than fundamentally trying to fix them. We have given up trying to fix mathematics.
Until §6, Aristotle writes the first history of philosophy, whilst §7 deals with Plato in the context of the development of the four causes, how much each of them fell short of Aristotle’s definition of good philosophy. 7-8 is a kind of review in regards to giving praise and blame regarding each philosophers. And so chapter 9 is only for Plato. Plato is most sophisticated so thus needs to actually be tackled with the deepest. When he uses the expression substantial reality, there it’s more determined which means the form that makes anything what it is. It relates to form, such as what we find in the pythagoreans. Then he also makes a distinction between the way in which the position of philosophy, ie. How much philosophy can extend to all things.
Aristotle criticises the theory of the forms in the context of Plato reduplicating reality in a way that might get out of control. He posits a seperated form which is in another reality rather than our own; expaining two realities seems superfluous and impossible. Here Aristotle points out something that Plato never says, that the form exists in the material – Plato only said that material only participates in the form. Here Aristotle makes Plato endorse his conception of reality, and he argues that there is an infinite regress if you look at Plato’s system in Aristotle’s system.
The very end is very short: what is wisdom? Here we see why Aristotle wrote his treaties; the history of philosophy is not a matter of information, but rather as a way to understand the point of philosophy, there is a clear relation between the history of philosophy and the actual doing of philosophy.
All men seem to seek the causes named in the physics, and that we cannot name any beyond these. (Though Ibn Sina speaks of a fifth cause because he had to explain reality created from nothing) though in a sense they have been described before, but they have not been properly elucidated”.
So he, in a sense, instantiates the idea of a child growing into an adult.
Now we have reached the consummation of the general picture of philosophy, no more really needs to be done, now only specific studies have to be done, according to Aristotle.
Philosophy has matured, but cannot really get much further than this.
It is useful to understand the project of book Alpha: He is using history like he is using literature to have a basis to argue on. It is dialectics in his sense, he finds endoxa in these earlier subjects.
Though of course the way in which he does it is, in a sense, circular, but really it is only a rhetorical device in order to prove his systems.
Remi Brague: an important heidegger, aristotle and islamic scholar. He wrote some books recently that live up to good standards but are not strictly academic, Europe: la ssdd romaine. He gives advice about how to conceive Europe in the future. There is one part based on his above expertices. He differentiates between the Greek and Latin conception of culture. Everything we know of Greek culture is thanks to the romans.
They discovered some texts in Pompei with a new technology, where there are philosophical texts of Greek authors in Greek, something new. The Roman culture is a culture that praises the study of philosophy though with a shadow of suspicion. While the Greek culture is a culture that tries to erase everything that is not Greek. Two very different cultural models. One point he makes is precisely to opening up to cultures different from your own, the Romans were curious, but the Greeks were not. eg. Julius Caesars writing of the Gauls, almost an ethnological study.
(were the Romans instead actually imperialists trying to make propaganda or were they actually interested in the cultures they conquered?) (The Greeks were colonialists too, this makes no sense)
Brague was interested in the ways cultures were integrated and were allowed to be transmitted throughout the empire, whilst Greek thinkers were not at all like this. (Alexander the Great was chastised for not converting all the people he conquered into proper Greeks).
The predominance of one language over another creates an assymetry, because what isn’t written in English is not called to attention as worthy philosophy. Philippe van Paris, who developed the theory of basic income (ewww), proposed the idea that anybody who is taxed is provoked??? Idrk what he is talking about now, this girl just discombobulated him too much.
Second point: what is knowledgable in Aristoteles. What is the most knowledgable. Aristoteles used this in direct proportion between what is knowledgeable in itself, and what is knowledgable for us. God is the most knowledgable in Itself, but is less knowledgable for us. The rain in Leuven is very knowledagable and very easy to know, something clearly obvious. But in itself, is a contingent ephemeral reality, and so thus not very knowledgable in itself.
There is a inverse relation between these two concepts in Aristotle.
In the very idea of speculation, we see this. What is first becomes last and what is last becomes first.
Greek columns are larger in the middle: why? The Greek culture who had such a sense for precision and perfection, decided to make the columns in a sense, elliptical. This is because from a distance, they look perfectly straight. Because something perfectly straight will looks unstraight from a distance.
This gives a first hint into two opposite ways in Greece to think of what is beautiful. What is beautiful is what it is according to its form according to Aristotle, or what is beautiful according to its appearances.
Wladislaw Tatarkiewicz, a Polish historian of philosophy who wrote about the history of aestethics.
Reality as we see with our senses, from a platonic persepctive is not the true reality, but what we perceive with our mind. What we perceive with the mind is the realm of the forms, the Ideas.
So if we make a copy of a copy, what is the use of that? You do not make a copy of a copy. Plato hates all kinds of figurative art, but leaves the door open for music, because for him music is a way in which the divinity can give a message to the human via people who are not aware of they are doing.
For Aristotle, if someone does anything and does not know why, they are not a philosopher at all. But sometimes we are fully unaware because we are possessed (mania) of what we are doing, and so possessed by divinity. All other arts suck though, they are irrelevant and suck.
In the case of Aristotle there is at least an attempt to describe those kinds of phenomena, like in the poetics, where he insists against Plato that there are two possibilities in art, Mania and Eufoea (natural ability). Eufoeaic people can repeat the techne they are able to perform. Aristotle favours Eufoea over Mania. They both have to do with mimesis (reenactment of a more abstract form). (To Plato and Aristotle there is only music with words, content, instruments were seen only as a support to music, accompagniment).
Thus there are two kinds of camps regarding the way in which a column like above is created. All those authors have a common denominator. Beauty is an arising balance between different parts. We always imply a plurality when speaking of beauty. Beauty is made by the combination of three elements: the integrity (anything that is expected to be present is present), eg. a statue, even though we can admire a Greek statue today, but in the Greek conception of beauty, if I make a statue without an arm, I cannot even consider it to beautiful because it is imperfect, it lacks what there is supposed to be. If something lacks proportion, or balance. Then there is a third principle, splendour (or clarity): once you have what is expected and good proprtions, you also have to have a glimpse of appreciation in the one who observes; it is related to the subject rather than the object.
Plotinus brings a revolution in this approach, because he is the first who vindicates the notion of beauty which is ultimately grounded in simplicity, without parts I cannot speak of due proportions. So before Plotinus, we always related beauty to their parts and how we relate them. The parts have to be organic. For Plotinus, the perfect beauty lacks parts. What we are appreciating is actually an invisible unity present in something. We appreciate things as their whole, not according to their parts.
Since everyone says they can appreciate beauty, Plotinus shows everyone how they are wrong, given the framework of his own system.