ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 12.1: ARISTOTLE
Early Academy:
- important context, founded 387 by Plato
- open arena for debate and discussion
- Aristotle leaves due to nepotism after Plato’s death (Speusippus)
- the One and the indefinite Dyad (numbers, shapes and cosmic soul are derived)
- Speusippus: episodic system, each ontological layer has different principles
- Xenocrates: conservative, Forms as numbers (ratios, intergers, etc.); soul is a self-moving/changing number
[Plutarch: but how does life, providence, etc. emerge from these numbers?] - Timaeus read as Pythagorean text, making Plato a Pythagorean
- what is Platonism? Speussipus abandoned the Forms, middle platonism merely did exegesis, etc.
- perhaps the Forms were not so important, and the Dyad and One were
Aristotle (Biography):
- born to Macedonian doctor
- studied in Academy (while Plato’s in Syracuse on his phil. king project) for 20 years until Plato’s death
- studied biology, what mathemathics is for Plato, biology is for Aristotle
- classifying species spills into logic, dialectic, ontology
- thought Alexander, who later rejected Aristotle’s teachings
- returns to Athens with Theophrastus, forms Lyceum
- Alexander dies and Aristotle flees Greece due to his connection, beginning of Hellenistic Age
- dies a year later, Theophrastus becomes his successor
Aristotle (His Work):
- in dialogue with Early Academy
- answers questions like what are the dialectic, definitions, qualities and our relations to them (so going beyond simply the Forms…)
- critiques Plato, posits truth as existing in this world
- no ‘published’ works survive, only teaching materials
- issues with tracing his thought, sometimes commentary would enter the text proper, etc.
Classification of Sciences:
- Theoretical: immutable, necessary objects
- Physics: objects with motion that aren’t separate from us (so Biology is Physics too)
- Mathematics: unmoved objects
- Metaphysics: unmoved objects existing apart from matter (the opposite of physics)
- Practical: concerns moral action, things that can be otherwise (Ethics, Politics)
- Poietic: objects that can be produced, the study regulates their production (Medicine, Architecture, Poetics, Rethoric)
- Logic: non-autonomous, the instrument of inquiry (semi-dialectic methodology of classifying reality)
The Organon:
- Categories: simple terms from which sentences are composed
- On Interpretation: sentences and their relations to each other
- Analytics: arguments; valid arguments (Prior Analytics) & demonstrative arguments (Posterior Analytics)
- Topics: Dialectical arguments
- Sophistical Refutations: the fallaciousness of Sophist argumentation
LOGIC (Its Building Blocks):
- combining subjects and verbs (not true/false) you create (sometimes) assertive sentences which can be true/false
- sentences can be Affirmative or Negative; Universal, Particular or Singular
- Neg. & Aff. cannot both be true (about the same subject)
- a Universal sentence implies a Particular (all humans implies a human, etc.)
- Neg. Univ. and Aff. Part. cannot both be true, and the inverse (contradiction)
Syllogisms:
- arguments that begin with premises and lead to a conclusion
- premises are assumed true, conclusion has to be new information and follow necessarily
- premise/conclusion are sentences as described above
- middle term syllogisms (with one term connecting two seperate terms) looks as such: P-M, M-S, P-S
[this is different from Stoic logic, since these are simply connections of terms, without conditionals, conjunctions, disjunctions or proper negations] - we can reach knowledge through demonstrative argumentation (Forms and anamnesis are rejected)
- for demonstrative argumentation we need a foundation we reach through induction, the PNC and TND (this intuition is intellection, intuition of the fundemental axioms)
Knowledge:
- knowing what something is, and what its causes are
- concerns universals, not particulars (Platonic leftover)
- you can never know smt about an object insofar as you consider it an individual with given accidents, but in so far as you consider it a member of a species
- so universals exist (continuation of the Socratic argument against the Sophists, positing knowledge as achievable), but the universals are not transcendent and exist within objects
- every science must begin with certain axioms, otherwise knowledge is unachievable, Metaphysical axioms (PNC, TND) are unviersal
Categories:
- Kategoreo, meaning to predicate
- so different predicates and predications, which really belong to something in the world
- this is an ordered, systematized, immanent translation of the Forms inspired by biology
- What is Socrates leads to his predicates, if you ask what the predicates are you reach the certain categories (Substance, Quality, etc.)
- the order is categories:genera:species:individuals
- different genera (for example) are more or less universal, belonging to more or less species/individuals
- Ousia/Substance is the first category, the other 9 depend on it for their existence
- Two predications: essential (human, animal); accidental (quantities, qualities); both make an individual, but to different extents and in different ways
- the individual substance always comes first, anti-Plato, all other universals are secondary predicates; and what remains the same is the individual substance, not the changing universals
Physics:
- about moving and inherent bodies
- return to the problem of motion (Anaxagoras, Empedocles)
- qualitative change has 3 principles: subject/substrate, privation, form
- generation is an essential change, the acquisition of an essential form
- first substances are FORM + MATTER composites (Form = ontological structure)
- no non being → being generation; only not being as such → being as such generation; change in Form, essential re-ordering
- 4 kinds of change (categories): generation/corruption [substance]; alteration [quality]; growth/diminution [quantity]; motion [place]
- 4 causes/explenations:
- Material (what is it made of?)
- Formal (what is its ontological structure?)
- Efficient (what moves it? what causes it to be such?)
- Final (what is it moving towards?)
- Highly teleolistic, everything tends towards the Good
- nature is the entire realm of motion; the principle of motion in animate beings is the soul (i.e. nature again)
- in inanimate ones it is their natural resting place (earth’s is below water, water’s air, air’s fire…) this applies to the SUBLUNAR world
- in the SUPERLUNAR world is the 5th element: aether (stars) moving in circular motion
- nature = essential form, so nature is a certain formal structure
- Platonic teleology (Demiurge) is intellectual
- Aristotle’s is natural; the unmoved mover contemplates the eternal eternally
- potentiality vs actuality (capacity to possibly do vs doing); potentiality is determined, and so one can learn many things, but these things are limited
- potentiality emerges through a causal actuality, so the actual is always prior
- first and second actuality (being able to, doing it)
Unmoved Mover:
- the first thing that set the universe in motion could not itself have been moved
- this would have lead to an infinite regress
- so the first thing must be something that moves others, but is unmoved itself
- it is incorporeal and unembodied
- this mover must be pure actuality, since the cosmos would stop if there was even the possibility of that actuality reverting to a potentiality, like in our sleep
Metaphysics (As Theology):
- the unmoved and immaterial, God, a kind of theology, also ontology as well as the study of principles and causes, a universal science
- movement and time are indestructable
- motion’s principle must be pure actuality and activity
- heavens are in between the sublunar and the unmoved mover
- the unmoved mover moves due to desire, the desire of the intellect towards it
- the unmoved mover is an efficient cause, that which causes motion to commence
- but its also treated like a final cause
- and each ‘heaven’ has its own soul, so maybe the first soul is the first thing moved
- the unmoved mover is always thinking itself, contemplating the world, always in actuality, etc.
- Metaphysics 12 reveals 55(?) unmoved movers, one for each heavanly sphere
- but they’re ordered, all thinking about the form of the unmoved mover, thinking about eternal truth
[RECAP: first mover, unmoved, contemplating, pure actuality, living the happiest life, incorporeal, transcendent, efficient and final cause]
Actuality & Potentiality:
- actuality ontologically prior to potentiality
- the potential to do something is always defined by the act of doing it
- actually is the full development, potentiality is only privation
- in time: for the potential to exist actuality must have come prior (adult parents are needed for children)
- so, actuality triggers a further potentiality
Metaphysics (As Ontology):
- the study of being qua being, being as being
- not one piece of being, but all of it
- being is varied, but we can see a given unity in the ways in which being is said
- it is substance that makes the science of being possible, since it is substance that expresses being
- Form is likeliest to be primary substance; it is that thing for which a given being is such, its ESSENCE
- individuals have ontological priority, but universals have epistemological priority (so we don’t study individual beings or forms, but universal ones)
- no universal is ever a substance, its the Forms which are simply universally predicated, arranged, structured…
- the genera are potentialities held in the form