Members of the Lyceum conducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of interest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric, political history, government and political theory, rhetoric, and the arts. In all these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according to some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of antiquity.
After thirteen years in Athens, Aristotle once again found cause to retire from the city, in Probably his departure was occasioned by a resurgence of the always-simmering anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, which was free to come to the boil after Alexander succumbed to disease in Babylon during that same year. Because of his connections to Macedon, Aristotle reasonably feared for his safety and left Athens, remarking, as an oft-repeated ancient tale would tell it, that he saw no reason to permit Athens to sin twice against philosophy.
He withdrew directly to Chalcis, on Euboea, an island off the Attic coast, and died there of natural causes the following year, in To begin, he makes heavy use of unexplained technical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove frustrating. Further, on occasion a chapter or even a full treatise coming down to us under his name appears haphazardly organized, if organized at all; indeed, in several cases, scholars dispute whether a continuous treatise currently arranged under a single title was ever intended by Aristotle to be published in its present form or was rather stitched together by some later editor employing whatever principles of organization he deemed suitable.
Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of Latin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded critic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and Greek. We must assume, then, that Cicero had before him works of Aristotle other than those we possess. In fact, we know that Aristotle wrote dialogues, presumably while still in the Academy, and in their few surviving remnants we are afforded a glimpse of the style Cicero describes.
In most of what we possess, unfortunately, we find work of a much less polished character. Unfortunately, then, we are left for the most part, though certainly not entirely, with unfinished works in progress rather than with finished and polished productions.
Still, many of those who persist with Aristotle come to appreciate the unembellished directness of his style. These works may be categorized in terms of the intuitive organizational principles preferred by Aristotle.
Moreover, again in his terminology, natural sciences such as physics are but one branch of theoretical science , which comprises both empirical and non-empirical pursuits. He distinguishes theoretical science from more practically oriented studies, some of which concern human conduct and others of which focus on the productive crafts.
Thus, the Aristotelian sciences divide into three: i theoretical, ii practical, and iii productive. The principles of division are straightforward: theoretical science seeks knowledge for its own sake; practical science concerns conduct and goodness in action, both individual and societal; and productive science aims at the creation of beautiful or useful objects Top. Many of the puzzles of primary concern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to philosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural scientists.
Natural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including biology, botany, and astronomical theory. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is inconclusive at best.
These deal with conduct and action, both individual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with theoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less obviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation of products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and ethics fall under this branch. The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to various forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political assemblies.
It systematizes the principles licensing acceptable inference, and helps to highlight at an abstract level seductive patterns of incorrect inference to be avoided by anyone with a primary interest in truth. So, alongside his more technical work in logic and logical theory, Aristotle investigates informal styles of argumentation and seeks to expose common patterns of fallacious reasoning. Although not so characterized in these terms by Aristotle, the name is apt, so long as it is borne in mind that intellectual inquiry requires a broad range of tools.
Thus, in addition to logic and argumentation treated primarily in the Prior Analytics and Topics , the works included in the Organon deal with category theory, the doctrine of propositions and terms, the structure of scientific theory, and to some extent the basic principles of epistemology. The titles in this list are those in most common use today in English-language scholarship, followed by standard abbreviations in parentheses. For no discernible reason, Latin titles are customarily employed in some cases, English in others.
Where Latin titles are in general use, English equivalents are given in square brackets. Whereas Descartes seeks to place philosophy and science on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge claims to a searing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable, that they for the most part put us into direct contact with the features and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with sceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy.
Accordingly, he proceeds in all areas of inquiry in the manner of a modern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that progress follows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when presented with a problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work, Aristotle begins by considering how the world appears, reflecting on the puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has been said about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin appeals to phainomena and the endoxic method.
Human beings philosophize, according to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience puzzling. According to Aristotle, it behooves us to begin philosophizing by laying out the phainomena , the appearances , or, more fully, things appearing to be the case , and then also collecting the endoxa , the credible opinions handed down regarding matters we find puzzling. As a typical example, in a passage of his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle confronts a puzzle of human conduct, the fact that we are apparently sometimes akratic or weak-willed.
When introducing this puzzle, Aristotle pauses to reflect upon a precept governing his approach to many areas of inquiry:. Scholars dispute concerning the degree to which Aristotle regards himself as beholden to the credible opinions endoxa he recounts and the basic appearances phainomena to which he appeals. So, as a group they must be re-interpreted and systematized, and, where that does not suffice, some must be rejected outright.
It is in any case abundantly clear that Aristotle is willing to abandon some or all of the endoxa and phainomena whenever science or philosophy demands that he do so Met.
Still, his attitude towards phainomena does betray a preference to conserve as many appearances as is practicable in a given domain—not because the appearances are unassailably accurate, but rather because, as he supposes, appearances tend to track the truth.
We are outfitted with sense organs and powers of mind so structured as to put us into contact with the world and thus to provide us with data regarding its basic constituents and divisions. While our faculties are not infallible, neither are they systematically deceptive or misdirecting. Of course, it is not always clear what constitutes a phainomenon ; still less is it clear which phainomenon is to be respected in the face of bona fide disagreement.
This is in part why Aristotle endorses his second and related methodological precept, that we ought to begin philosophical discussions by collecting the most stable and entrenched opinions regarding the topic of inquiry handed down to us by our predecessors. Each of these translations captures at least part of what Aristotle intends with this word, but it is important to appreciate that it is a fairly technical term for him. An endoxon is the sort of opinion we spontaneously regard as reputable or worthy of respect, even if upon reflection we may come to question its veracity.
Aristotle appropriates this term from ordinary Greek, in which an endoxos is a notable or honourable man, a man of high repute whom we would spontaneously respect—though we might, of course, upon closer inspection, find cause to criticize him. Endoxa play a special role in Aristotelian philosophy in part because they form a significant sub-class of phainomena EN b3—8 : because they are the privileged opinions we find ourselves unreflectively endorsing and reaffirming after some reflection, they themselves come to qualify as appearances to be preserved where possible.
He does think this, as far as it goes, but he also maintains, more instructively, that we can be led astray by the terms within which philosophical problems are bequeathed to us. Very often, the puzzles confronting us were given crisp formulations by earlier thinkers and we find them puzzling precisely for that reason. Equally often, however, if we reflect upon the terms within which the puzzles are cast, we find a way forward; when a formulation of a puzzle betrays an untenable structuring assumption, a solution naturally commends itself.
This is why in more abstract domains of inquiry we are likely to find ourselves seeking guidance from our predecessors even as we call into question their ways of articulating the problems we are confronting. Aristotle applies his method of running through the phainomena and collecting the endoxa widely, in nearly every area of his philosophy. To take a typical illustration, we find the method clearly deployed in his discussion of time in Physics iv 10— We begin with a phainomenon : we feel sure that time exists or at least that time passes.
So much is, inescapably, how our world appears: we experience time as passing, as unidirectional, as unrecoverable when lost. Yet when we move to offer an account of what time might be, we find ourselves flummoxed.
For guidance, we turn to what has been said about time by those who have reflected upon its nature. It emerges directly that both philosophers and natural scientists have raised problems about time. As Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles, or aporiai , regarding whether and if so how time exists Phys.
If we say that time is the totality of the past, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that time exists but that the past and future do not. According to the objector, only the present exists. If we retort then that time is what did exist, what exists at present and what will exist, then we notice first that our account is insufficient: after all, there are many things which did, do, or will exist, but these are things that are in time and so not the same as time itself.
We further see that our account already threatens circularity, since to say that something did or will exist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or will come to exist at a later time. Then again we find someone objecting to our account that even the notion of the present is troubling.
After all, either the present is constantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains forever the same, then the current present is the same as the present of 10, years ago; yet that is absurd.
If it is constantly changing, then no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must have come into and out of existence before the present present. Either it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which seems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some instant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two presents must have existed at the same instant.
Now, Aristotle does not endorse the claims set out in stating these sorts of aporiai ; in fact, very often he cannot, because some aporiai qualify as aporiai just because they comprise individually plausible arguments generating incompatible conclusions. They thus serve as springboards to deeper, more demanding analysis. In general, then, in setting such aporiai , Aristotle does not mean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the other. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible puzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a defensible understanding of the nature of time.
In this way, aporiai bring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is to be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding time, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility, about quanta and continua , and about a variety of categorial questions.
That is, if time exists, then what sort of thing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and independently?
Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a surface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we begin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain the sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to us regarding the nature of time.
Consequently, when we collect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn something about our quarry, in this case about the nature of time—and crucially also something about the constellation of concepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical progress with respect to it.
What holds in the case of time, Aristotle implies, holds generally. This is why he characteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the phainomena , collecting the endoxa , and running through the puzzles to which they give rise.
Whereas science relies upon premises which are necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed by relying on endoxa , and so can claim only to be as secure as the endoxa upon which it relies. This is not a problem, suggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in circumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific understanding.
Minimally, however, all reasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect the canons of logic and inference. Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic. Of course, philosophers before Aristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them had a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and soundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a systematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and no-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic principles at play in such inference.
Aristotle somewhat uncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a discussion of logic inference and fallacy:. Generally, a deduction sullogismon , according to Aristotle, is a valid or acceptable argument. His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of validity, though there are some minor differences.
For example, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a deduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to the addition of premises of any kind to an already valid argument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make progress, whereas every inference from p to p is trivially valid.
In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort of argument whose structure guarantees its validity, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds intuitively for the following structure:.
This particular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no proof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: any proof would seem to rely ultimately upon the intuitive validity of this sort of argument.
Aristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect deductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his subject: he thinks he can establish principles of transformation in terms of which every deduction or, more precisely, every non-modal deduction can be translated into a perfect deduction. He contends that by using such transformations we can place all deduction on a firm footing. The perfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal affirmation: all A s are B s; all B s C s; and so, all A s are C s.
Now, contends Aristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple premises and display their basic inferential structures and then to relate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions.
It turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid syllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of counterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not. There are counterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be called undistributed middle terms, e. There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the form of a universal affirmation: if all A s are B s, and all B s C s, then there is no escaping the fact that all A s are C s.
So, if all the kinds of deductions possible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the validity of all can be vouchsafed. To effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of meta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely reports though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of proofs. His principles are meta -theorems in the sense that no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine deduction.
They include such theorems as: i no deduction contains two negative premises; ii a deduction with a negative conclusion must have a negative premise; iii a deduction with a universal conclusion requires two universal premises; and iv a deduction with a negative conclusion requires exactly one negative premise. He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his meta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his system are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp immediately.
In developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle charts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many centuries after his death. Aristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but with a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a tool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution to science and dialectic. A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism, and certainly science must employ arguments passing this threshold.
By this he means that they should reveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things. That is, science explains what is less well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what is explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful. We may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the autumn. We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing through them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since the wind blows equally at other times of year without the same result.
A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but illustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more causal in character: trees shed their leaves because diminished sunlight in the autumn inhibits the production of chlorophyll, which is required for photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis trees go dormant. Importantly, science should not only record these facts but also display them in their correct explanatory order. That is, although a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a tree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce chlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the other way around.
This sort of asymmetry must be captured in scientific explanation. Science seeks to capture not only the causal priorities in nature, but also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition to being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific deduction will be necessary. So, says Aristotle:. For this reason, science requires more than mere deduction. Altogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration apodeixis , where a demonstration is a deduction with premises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as to capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and more intelligible by nature APo 71b33—72a5, Phys.
If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the less well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better known, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced either to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better known, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of circularity, which seems undesirable.
The alternative seems to be permanent ignorance. Aristotle contends:. In sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all demonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what is less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to a halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known securely. In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience empeiria —which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles.
This final intellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated intellectual apprehension nous of first principles APo. Scholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted passage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the necessary, as required for the first principles of science.
Perhaps, however, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori necessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any event, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we begin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the necessary and invariant features of the world.
Not all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. As he recognizes, we often find ourselves reasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa , opinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are not known to be necessary.
Still less often do we reason having first secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. This method he characterizes as dialectic. In fact, in his work dedicated to dialectic, the Topics , he identifies three roles for dialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly preparatory:. The first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle are rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically significant.
In these contexts, dialectic helps to sort the endoxa , relegating some to a disputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to cross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most notably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first principles Top. If that is so, then dialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical discovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining which among our initial endoxa withstand sustained scrutiny.
Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces a noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and investigation. However we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science, whether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary truths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over judiciously selected endoxa , it does turn out, according to Aristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary features of reality.
He relies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the essences of things, and these give some clue to his general orientation. In speaking this way, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is, we cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind; nor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run explanatorily deep.
Rather, as his preferred locution indicates, he is interested in what makes a human being human—and he assumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans have in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we find across the range of humans. Importantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism differentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach, according to which: [ 8 ].
Aristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most notably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the definition. Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the number nine , Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he calls idia Cat. Propria are non-essential properties which flow from the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind even without being essential.
For instance, if we suppose that being rational is essential to human beings, then it will follow that every human being is capable of grammar. Being capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational, though it follows from it.
Aristotle assumes his readers will appreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains being capable of grammar , even though, necessarily, something is rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus, because it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better claim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable of grammar.
Aristotelian essentialism holds:. Accordingly, this is the feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human beings APo 75a42—b2; Met. Aristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences discoverable by diligent research.
He in fact does not devote much energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined to expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism, perhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he finds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological investigation. On the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others are prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial prominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato.
Indeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for Aristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and invariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity , or homonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the Categories , Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy and homonymy later called univocity and multivocity. All these locutions have a quasi-technical status for him. The least complex is univocity:.
In cases of univocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture and state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once more for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying definition of human is rational animal. Then, since human means rational animal across the range of its applications, there is some single essence to all members of the kind.
Very regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads to an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a univocal account where in fact none is forthcoming.
This, according to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume univocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity. In one especially important example, Aristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:. Rather, goodness is different in different cases. If he is right about this, far-reaching consequences regarding ethical theory and practice follow. Consider the following sentences:. Among the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics is a simple paraphrase test: if paraphrases yield distinct, non-interchangeable accounts, then the predicate is multivocal.
So, for example, suitable paraphrases might be:. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to assume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity ignored by their assumption. Importantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative role for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its destructive applications a philosophically constructive role for homonymy.
To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a continuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure Platonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family resemblance. One might in the face of a successful challenge to Platonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of goodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things form at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans enamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: all good things belong to a kind only in the limited sense that they manifest a tapestry of partially overlapping properties, as every member of a single family is unmistakably a member of that family even though there is no one physical attribute shared by all of those family members.
Aristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family resemblance and pure univocity: he identifies, and trumpets, a kind of core-dependent homonymy also referred to in the literature, with varying degrees of accuracy, as focal meaning and focal connexion. Aristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two features of these three predications of healthy.
First, they are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as promotes health and the third as is indicative of health , whereas the first means, rather, something more fundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning well. Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second, even so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their elucidations: each appeals to health in its core sense in an asymmetrical way.
That is, any account of each of the latter two predications must allude to the first, whereas an account of the first makes no reference to the second or third in its account. So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a homonym, but a core-dependent homonym : while not univocal neither is it a case of rank multivocity.
So, he is right that these are not exhaustive options. The interest in this sort of result resides in its exportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. Aristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of philosophical concepts including justice , causation , love , life , sameness , goodness , and body. His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy comes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult to gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection.
This is his appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being , which has inspired both philosophical and scholarly controversy. B 3, b22; EE i 8, b33— One motivation for his reasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive, [ 12 ] so that it makes ready sense to speak of a genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of non-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the animals and the non-animals, viz.
Since there are no non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so, ultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each science studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there can be no science of being either. Subsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the existence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is nonetheless a science of being qua being Met. Although the matter is disputed, his recognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being itself.
Of course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward locutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can speak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but only because of their dependence upon the core instance of being, namely substance.
So, exists in the first instance serves as the core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be explicated. If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle, being is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of being—or, rather, a science of being qua being—becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being, since it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are related to the core instance of being, and then also to study that core instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime occasion of being.
In speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence, Aristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment which appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his entire philosophical career: his theory of categories.
In what is usually regarded as an early work, The Categories , Aristotle rather abruptly announces:. Aristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no explicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory of categories categorizes. If librarians categorize books and botanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category theorist categorize?
Aristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably clear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may be. If that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the sorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or facts.
The constituents of facts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a proposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has. If it is a fact that Socrates is pale , then the basic beings in view are Socrates and being pale.
Importantly, these beings may be basic without being absolutely simple. After all, Socrates is made up of all manner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and atoms, and so on down. The theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of extra-linguistic basic beings:. Although he does not say so overtly in the Categories , Aristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are both exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other basic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these categories in favor of another.
His birth day is estimated to fall between BC and BC. This theory was created to solve two problems, one of ethics and one of permanence and change. The ethical problem is: how can humans live a fulfilling life in an ever changing world if everything that they hold close to them can be easily taken away?
The problem dealing with permanence and change is: How can the world appear to be both permanent and changing? The world we perceive through senses seems to be always changing—which is a pretty clear observation.
The world that we perceive through the mind, seems to be permanent and unchanging. Which world perceived is more real? Why are we seen two different worlds? To find a solution to these problems, Plato split the world into two: the material, or phyiscal, realm and the transcendent, or mental, realm of forms. We have access to the realm of forms through the mind, allowing us access to an unchanging world.
This particular world is invulnerable to the pains and changes of the material world. By detaching our souls from the material world and our bodies and developing our ability to concern ourselves with the forms, Plato believes this will lead to us finding a value which is not open to change. This solves the ethical problem. Splitting existence up into two realms also leads us to a solution to the problem of permanence and change. Our mind perceives a different world, with different objects, than our senses do.
It is the material world, perceived through the senses, that is changing. It is the realm of forms, perceived through the mind, that is permanent. I am currently studying aristotle and plato so this is a really welcome post. Human Appendix? If knowledge is changing and everything has a purpose and if we understand purpose, we gain knowledge, does that mean purpose is knowledge? If true, does this imply purpose also changes and is not fixed.
So, may be human appendix had purpose but not anymore. You have elaborately pointed out the differences in their philosophical point of views. Aristotle had a more rational approach than Plato.
Before Aristotle Philosophy was completely confined within metaphysical realm, but Aristotle introduced the rational approach. Marine Biology. Electrical Engineering. Computer Science. Medical Science. Writing Tutorials. Performing Arts. Visual Arts. Student Life. Vocational Training. Standardized Tests.
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