Introduction to Philosophy

(Announcement: 15 copies of the textbook arrived late Friday afternoon.)

Aristotle.

His life.
Born in 384 BCE in Stagira, died at age 62 in 322, a year after the death of Alexaner the Great.
Entered Plato’s Academy at about your age, when he was about 18 (367). He remained in the Academy, which was the center of learning in the Mediterranean world, for 20 years, till the death of its founder Plato in 347. In the later years he himself lectured at the Academy, and was certainly the one to whom the direction of the Academy would naturally have been offered. But his philosophy was too much at variance by then with that of Plato, so Plato's nephew Speusippus was chosen instead. (Note from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Diogenes tells us (iv 1) that Speusippus “abided by the views of Plato”; from what little we can tell, this is simply false. In particular, Speusippus rejected the Theory of Forms.) Alexander left Athens, and eventually became the tutor of the 13 year old son of Philip of Macedonia, whose name was Alexander, to be know after his father’s death as Alexander the Great, the world conqueror. That job lasted from 342-335, about 7 years. He then returned to Athens and founded his own school, called the Lyceum (founded in 335).

When teaching at the Lyceum, he practiced peripatetics, meaning "to walk about." For the next thirteen years he devoted his energies to his teaching and composing his philosophical treatises. He is said to have given two kinds of lectures: the more detailed discussions in the morning for an inner circle of advanced students, and the popular discourses in the evening for the general body of lovers of knowledge. At the sudden death of Alexander in 323 BCE., the pro-Macedonian government in Athens was overthrown, and a general reaction occurred against anything Macedonian. A charge of impiety was trumped up against him. To escape prosecution he fled to Chalcis in Euboea so that (Aristotle says) "The Athenians might not have another opportunity of sinning against philosophy as they had already done in the person of Socrates." In the first year of his residence at Chalcis he complained of a stomach illness and died in 322 BCE.

His philosophy. Critique of Plato.
"Plato separated the forms," he said laconically. We must explore what is behind this critique. Form and matter are always conjoined. The form is the "whatness " of the thing. Its essence. (In Aristotle, this is related to the function of the thing--a questionable thesis for modern thought.)

An object' matter is its "thisness." The principle of individuation. An object with both form and matter is "substance." Substance is divided into essence and accident. Reality is for Aristotle composed of a number of substances: hence we speak of him as a pluralist rather than a dualist (which was the case with Plato). The individual substance is a self-contained teleological (goal-oriented) system. Substances are analyzed in terms of the four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The prime mover, the good toward which all things move. Perfection, hence pure actuality, pure activity. These are the main traits of Aristotle's metaphysics.

Aristotle's ethics.
All is performed for a purpose, the final purpose of which is happiness (eudaimonia). What is the function of the human being? To engage in "an activity of the soul which is in accordance with virtue," and "in conformity with reason." The material preconditions for happiness (cf. p. 76). Virtue is areté (= excellence). Two kinds of virtue: intellectual and moral (cf. figure on p. 77). The golden mean. Facing danger, one extreme is not enough fear (= foolhardiness), and the other is too much fear (cowardice); the proper amount of fear is courage.

Politics.
The three forms of government and their perversions: the monarchy (government by one person, the perversion of which is tyranny), governance by an elite group (government by an aristocracy, the perversion of which is the oligarchy), and the polity (governance by the body of citizens themselves, the perversion of which is the democracy (cf. p. 81. Aristotle's case for slavery.

Aesthetics.
His defense of rhetoric and poetry. You will remember that Plato’s Republic exiles poets and artists (Bk 10), for they deal in lesser realities, and they stir up the emotions, specifically terror and pity. Now in fact Plato’s prose is a poetic prose, full of metaphors and evocative similes. Tradition has it that Plato, obsessed with poetry in his youth, had written dithyrambs and tragedies, but destroyed them when he met Socrates. That affinity is still perceptible in the Symposium. Aristotle is a much dryer sort of writer, and nobody thinks he is much of a stylist. Yet he wrote a treatise called the Poetics, in which he says that poetry is more philosophical than history (because it says what is true by and large and for the most part—thus moving in the positive direction of abstraction.) In that work, which is really a set of lecture notes, Aristotle defends the right of poetry to be true to life in being emotive. The theory of catharsis. But he is a 4^th-century intellectual, and does not believe in the gods, as Homer did, and Sophocles, et al.

Logic. The syllogism. The science of valid inference.

Also an ardent explorer of the natural world, particularly sea creatures. A natural scientist.