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History of Philosophy Lecture 9 Aristotle. By David Kelsey. Aristotle: 384-322 B.C. Born in northern Thrace His father was a physician Student of Plato: Studied in Plato’s academy from 367 B.C. until the death of Plato in 347 B.C. Then pursued research in biology
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History of PhilosophyLecture 9Aristotle By David Kelsey
Aristotle: 384-322 B.C. Born in northern Thrace His father was a physician Student of Plato: Studied in Plato’s academy from 367 B.C. until the death of Plato in 347 B.C. Then pursued research in biology Tutor for Alexander “the Great” 335: founded the Lyceum in Athens where he remained until 323 B.C. Aristotle
Aristotle & Plato:basic differences • Aristotle vs. Plato: • Plato is a rationalist and Aristotle is an Empiricist: • Plato the rationalist: • The best means of gaining knowledge is through the rational intellect • Knowledge cannot be attained through the senses as they cannot be trusted and so we cannot have knowledge of the sensible world • Deduction • Mathematics… • Innate knowledge… • Aristotle the Empiricist: • We can have knowledge of the sensible world & the senses are the only reliable means of gaining this knowledge • Induction • Science is the model for knowledge • No innate knowledge…
Aristotle vs. Plato cont. • Aristotle vs. Plato: • Objects of knowledge: • Plato: • Believed that reality, ultimately, rested on the Forms • The sensible objects depend for their existence on the Forms. • Aristotle: • Believed that the forms have no independent existence from their sensible objects • Instead, all sensible objects are just a combination of matter and form... • Relativism and Skepticism: • Plato: • His main motivation is to refute the skeptical and relativistic Sophist for it was these views that had really killed Socrates • Hence, the Forms are absolute reality • Aristotle: • As a biologist and scientist believes we can come to have knowledge of the sensory world • We must simply find out which method is best…
Aristotle vs. Plato • Aristotle vs. Plato: • Otherworldliness: • Plato: • the world of sense is merely a distraction to the real knowledge of the Forms • so one must leave the world of sense behind to truly be wise. • To philosophize is to die away from the world of sense. • Aristotle: • Philosophy is not an escape from sensible objects but instead it is a way of knowing them. • The Soul: • Plato: • The soul is immortal and the body is not. The soul makes the person not the body. • Aristotle: • Man is a rational animal • The soul is just the form of the particular body that a man has. • So the soul cannot exist independently of the body at all. • Instead, a person is a creature unified of matter and form, I.e. body and soul.
Logic • Aristotle is the founding father of logic: • Logic aims at discriminating good arguments from bad ones. • Refuting the Sophist view… • Sophisms: • For Aristotle, logic pervades his entire account of reality. • Induction is the tool: forming universal and particular judgments on the basis of experience is the rule for knowledge. • Knowledge involves both statements that something is or isn’t so and the reasons for the truth of those statements. The 3 tasks of his logic: • 1-explain how statements are constructed (out of terms) • 2-explain how statements compose arguments • 3-explain what makes statements true or false
Statements • Statements: • Terms pick out categories of things in the world (C 4): • Examples of categories: Substance, Quantity, Quality, Place, Time & Doing something • Terms are never true or false • Terms combine to make statements (C 4) • A statement relates two terms in some way. For example… • Statements have exactly 2 terms • Subject term: what we are talking about • Predicate term: what we are saying about the subject • Example:
Substances and terms • Substances and terms: • A Primary Substance can only play the role of Subject term (C 5) • Primary substances are the subject to all other categories • One interesting implication: Primary substances are, for Aristotle, the most real things there are. Thus, Aristotle rejects what? • Secondary substances can play the role of both subject and predicate (C 5): • We can say Aristotle is a man or A man is an animal or An animal is a living thing. • Primary substances have a species. • The species of Aristotle is man. • Species have a genus. • The genus of man is animal. There are other species of the genus animal as well, for example, lions or whales. • Secondary substances can include any species or genera of a primary substance • They are substances because they express the essential nature of primary substances
Truth • Truth for Aristotle: • Pertains to what we say • It is statements that are true or false • Example: • The Correspondence Theory of Truth: • Truth represents things as they are (M 4.7) • Falsehood represents things other than they are (M 4.7) • A Statement is true just when it corresponds to Reality • Mapping on to reality
Arguments and statements • The Syllogism: • A wise person gives reasons for the statements she makes. • Giving a reason is giving an argument. It is to offer premises for some conclusion. • Arguments are composed of statements. • Statements can be affirmative or negative. Examples: • Statements can also be either universal or they can be particular. Examples… • Aristotle focuses on one type of argument, the syllogism: • 2 premise • deductive
The Syllogism • The syllogism: • Syllogisms have exactly 3 statements and exactly 3 terms. • Each statement has exactly 2 terms. • Each term must occur in 2 of the argument’s statements • Middle term, major term and minor term • Validity is determined by form: • Good syllogisms are valid. If their premises are true their conclusion must be true. • The validity of a syllogism is wholly dependent on the form of it… • Thus, if a syllogism is valid, any other syllogism of the same form is also valid. • Testing syllogisms by form… • Categorical logic…
First Principles • Can everything that is knowable be proved through logic? • Giving a proof of a statement means composing a syllogism in its favor. • But we can ask: is there also proof for the premises? New syllogisms… • But of the new syllogisms we can ask: is there proof for their premises? • Such a process would go on to infinity. • First Principles: • So there must exist some claims which cannot be proved. These would be starting points... (PA 1.2) • True, absolute & unshakeable knowledge. (PA 1.2) • Aristotle is an Empiricist, so the First principles can be known through the senses. • He thinks perception isn’t knowledge but knowledge begins in perception.
Knowledge and Induction • Knowledge from induction: • Knowledge comes from the faculties of perceiving and of memory. • We retain traces from what we perceive in encountering the environment. • These traces build up into “experience”. • Experience is the source of Universals and the first principles are Universals. • The biologist: • She observes many creatures. She begins to group them according to their similarities-the many particulars are labeled under more general names and so on… • Her perception provides her with “universals” • The Universals provide definitions of natural kinds. • Examples: ‘Man’ and ‘Animal’ • The wider our experience the stronger the inductive definition... • Such definitions are our First Principles…
Aristotle’s Empiricism andhis Metaphysics • Aristotle’s metaphysics is connected to his Empiricism: • The world is made up of things, the primary substances, that are ordered, • The substances have principles of intelligibility within them; these principles are internal to them. • These principle can be known. • How, for Aristotle, can they be known?
Nature and Artifacts • The world is composed of 2 different kinds of things: • Nature facts (PH 2.1): • Things that exist by nature • Has in itself a source of movement and rest, for example the movement from place to place (local motion), growth and decay, or qualitative change. • Beaver example… • Artifacts (PH 2.1): • Have not come together by nature; is the product of art • No natural impulse for change • Only change because they are made of natural things or because of some external activity • Examples: bed frames and swords… • Physics: • Nature is the locus of change. It is composed of primary substances that are the subjects of change. They change in 2 ways: 1-they come into being and pass away & 2-they very in quality, quantity, relation and so on • If we observe closely we can know the principles governing these changes.
Material Cause &Formal Cause • When asking why things are as they are we can have 4 questions in mind: • Material cause: • We can ask what is the matter of which the thing is made. • For example… • Formal cause: • We can ask why is this X an X? • For example… • We answer: because it has the characteristics of the Form of X. • The form of a thing is its having the characteristics that make it the thing it is
Matter and Form • Substances are composed of Matter and Form: • A substance is composed of matter and form. But the substance X doesn’t exist as an X until the matter takes on the Form of X. (PH 2.1) • The elements of matter that make up a substance aren’t yet the substance but are only potentially that substance. They actually become the substance when they acquire the form of it. (PH 2.1) • Examples: bones and statues… • So matter considered apart from form is only potentially something (PH 2.1): • But if you stripped off all form you wouldn’t have an independently existing object at all. • Matter exists only as formed… • And form is only theoretically separable from matter (PH 2.1): • But although we can consider the form of an X independent of the thing itself, substance only exists as combination of form and matter. So the form is not something which exists independently of the matter. • So Aristotle denies what about Plato’s theory?
The efficient cause • The efficient cause: • The efficient cause comes from answers to such questions as: • What comes to be after what (PH 2.7) • What was the immediate thing that acted or was acted upon (PH 2.7) • Explains the fact of something‘s coming to be • It’s proximate mover (PH 2.7) • Examples:
The Final Cause • The Final Cause (PH 2.7): • The “what for” of the thing in question • We are asking for the purpose served or the ends satisfied • For example, Why are there houses? • We are asking what purpose they serve or what ends they satisfy? • The final cause: • The business of the natural scientist: to know the 4 causes. • The 4 kinds of causes are what?
The final cause:purpose vs. accident • For Aristotle, all substances have a final cause: • Artifacts have a purpose (PH 2.5): • there is intention behind them • House example… • Nature facts have a purpose (PH 2.5): • Accidents don’t have a purpose (for example…) • But all other nature facts do. Aristotle thinks they will always have a purpose. • Intentions are formed… • For example:
Do Nature facts always have a purpose? • But maybe Aristotle is wrong and nature facts don’t have purpose after all. • Maybe Democritus is correct and everything in nature happens according to chance, according to the laws of physics. • Aristotle’s response: • Art either completes nature or imitates nature • examples: the art of the physician or house builder. • But there is purpose in art so there is purpose in nature also.
Teleology • Teleology: the idea that natural substances are for something • There is a determinate pattern in the history of the development of a substance. • This pattern, that in which the substance develops, is always the same. • Frog example… • So substances have an entelechy: • A telos or end goal is present in a substance. (the tadpole will become the frog) • The entelechy is the indwelling of the telos at every stage of its development. • Actuality and Potentiality: • Earlier forms of a substance are already potentially what they will actually become later. • The telos and entelechy determines this… • For example: • In the egg there is a potentiality to become frog…
First Philosophy • Metaphysics is first philosophy: • Each science brings its subject matter together under some unifying first principles. • But we might ask: is there some still higher unity to what there is? • Is being unified by any principles of it that are true throughout. (M 6.1) • First philosophy would then examine the principles taken for granted by all the special sciences (M 6.1). • So first philosophy looks for the ultimate principles and causes of all things. • So First Philosophy is concerned with being in an unqualified sense: being qua being. (M 6.1)
Plato’s first philosophy • Plato’s first philosophy: • What is it? • But Aristotle disagrees: he thinks Forms aren’t anything over and above the substance itself. • He gives several arguments against the reality of the forms • 1-the third man argument • 2-objects of sense derive their reality by participating in the forms. But Plato never explains what it means for an object of sense to participate in a form. He owes us an explanation. (M 1.9) • 3-to say that the forms have independent existence from the objects that participate in them is to multiply the entities needing explanation. (M 1.9)
Aristotle against Plato’s forms • Aristotle gives 2 more arguments against Plato’s forms: • 4-the reality of the forms is conflicted (M 7.16): • If the forms are individual substances, how can they be shared out among other individual substances? • But if the forms are universal in character (shared among substances,) how can they exist separately from the particulars that participate in them? • 5-how do the forms account for change in objects of sense? • How can something that is eternal, stable and unchanging as the forms are explain change at all (M 1.9) • The forms don’t cause things to move for example
Aristotle on Mathematics • Aristotle on Mathematics: • Some of Plato’s most convincing arguments for the forms come from mathematics • Consider the slave boy in Meno • For Aristotle, mathematics is not in nature at all. • It is merely abstractions and generalizations taken from natural things. But these abstractions are not things themselves. (PH 2.2) • So we can conceptually separate mathematical concepts and principles from objects of sense without having to suppose that such concepts and principles exist independently from those things. (PH 2.2) • Snub Noses…
Aristotle’s first philosophy:essences • Substances: • For something to be in the primary sense, is for it to be a substance. • When we ask what something is, the answer is it’s substance. • Essences: • But we can ask: what makes a thing the particular substance it is? For Aristotle: the form known as it’s essence (M 7.17) • Essences are expressed by definitions telling us what things are (M 7.17) • They are a set of characteristics: • without which a thing would not be the thing it is. • That satisfy a things definition • That cause it to be the thing it is • House example • Frog example: amphibiousness • So essence is the very substance of substance itself: it is the cause of the substantiality of all things. (M 7.17)
Pure Forms • If essence and so form is the cause of substance itself, might there not be substances that are pure forms? • Pure form: • not a compound of matter and form • Pure actualities: • only matter involves potentiality • Unchanging & eternal: • change is movement from potentiality to actuality • The best things: • a substance is best when its essence is most fully actualized in the matter • The most divine knowledge would be of pure forms:
The Prime Mover • An argument for a prime mover (M 12.7): • 1. Assume that all things are intermediate movers. • An intermediate mover both is moved and moves other things. Example: bat, batter and ball… • 2. If all things were intermediate movers the series of cause and effect would go on to infinity. • 3. There cannot be any actually existing collection of infinitely many things. • Thus, 4. There must be something that moves things without being moved. This would be a prime or first or unmoved mover.
The Prime Mover • The prime mover (M 12.7): • Eternal: must account for the movement of the eternal heavenly bodies • Substance: other substances depend upon it • Fully actual: otherwise it’s movement would need a cause • The Final cause: • All other things love it and their love for it puts them in motion • His existence is necessary and so must be good • As the desire of all things it’s life is best. But the best life is the life of mind. • God…
God • The final cause is God: • God is an eternal immaterial unchanging substance who lives a life of perfect fully actualized thought (M 12.7) • Since the object of perfect thought must be what is most divine and since thought itself is most divine, the object of God’s fully actualized thought is thought itself. • So God will engage eternally in a contemplation of his own life: • God’s relation to the world is that of ideal:
The soul • The soul: • The greek word for soul is psyche • Aristotle argues that soul is something shared by all living things (PS 1.1) • Soul: “that which distinguishes what has a soul from what has not is life” • But some souls are more fundamental than others (PS 2.3) • Rectangles and triangles… • So there are more primitive souls and more complex souls built upon them. • For Aristotle there are 3 levels of soul…
The Nutritive Soul • The Nutritive soul (PS 2.2): • The most primitive and fundamental form of soul • Possessed by all living things • Plants… • The faculty to take in nourishment and convert it to life • The faculty to grow or decay in opposite directions
Reproduction • Reproduction (PS 2.4): • Both plants and animals reproduce • For Aristotle, they do so because there is a final cause in reproduction • The final cause is God, the unmoved mover • Plants and animals alike have a desire to share, as far as possible, the eternity and divinity that is God • Reproduction is as close to eternity as mortal beings can come…
The Sensitive Soul • The sensitive soul (PS 2.3): • To possess the ability to sense, to have sensations • For example • Belongs to animals and humans • Not Plants… • If a being possesses the sensitive soul it must also possess the appetitive soul (PS 2.3) • Appetite consists of desire, anger and will • Touch feel pleasure and pain desire
The Rational Soul • The Rational Soul: • Soul that has the capacity to think • Only human beings have a Rational Soul • So the higher kinds of soul always incorporate the lower, but the lower can exist without the higher
The relationship of soul and body • Soul and body: • For Aristotle, a soul is just the form of a primary substance: it is the essence of that substance, those characteristics that are essential to it. • A person is one being with one essence (PS 1.4 & 2.1) • So sensation is not the task of the soul alone. It cannot occur with the body, sense organs, etc. (PS 1.4) • And Recollection has its effects in bodily movements (PS 1.4) • The soul is the form of a natural body that potentially possesses life • The soul is the actuality of a body of this particular kind • So if you subtract from a living being its soul, you are left with a body that is potentially alive but isn’t • But if you add back to that body its soul, it is now capable of performing all the activities that are essential to that thing. • Think of Frankenstein • So the soul cannot exist independently of the body. • And the soul cannot survive the death of the body to which it gives form • (Note that he says something very different about the rational soul)
Nous • Nous is the rational soul • Nous is translated as mind • It is responsible for thought • It is an active capacity • 2 aspects of Nous: • -one aspect is passive • It becomes everything. It can adapt to receive the form of just about anything. (PS 3.5) • In your consciousness there is a kind of registration of everything in your visual field. • Examples: daydreaming • The second aspect is active • It makes everything (PS 3.5) • It is like light making what are potentially colors become colors in actuality (PS 3.5) • Actively paying attention makes what was potentially knowable into something actually known • It is an actual power to produce knowledge from the mere registrations of passive nous
Nous again • The active part of Nous: • Can actualize everything we can observe • It cannot be material otherwise it wouldn’t be flexible enough to actualize all things • So it is pure form, unmixed with matter • So it is not part of the body • Active Nous is separable from the body • Aristotle thought there was nothing in the body to serve as the organ of thought: not the heart or brain… • Active Nous is immortal and eternal • Not material pure actualized form lacks change fully and eternally what it is. • But we have no innate knowledge: • Active nous ca only produce knowledge if it can be delivered by the senses and registered by passive nous (PS 3.5) • But neither passive nous nor the sense organs existed before birth. • Thus, we do not remember anything before birth (PS 3.5) • Knowledge after death?
Aristotle’s Ethics • Virtue Ethics: • Like Plato, Aristotle thinks the virtuous person is the happy person. • For Aristotle, the highest good in all matters of action is happiness. • Eudaemonia… • But man is most happy when he is man in the best way • So happiness is achieved when man is functioning well as man. • But man’s function is: • Activity of soul in conformity with reason, or at least not without reason. (NE 1.7) • But human life is not limited to purely intellectual pursuits. Thus, man’s function is: • Activity of soul in conformity with excellence; and if there is more than one excellence, it will be the best and most complete of these. (NE 1.7) • Thus, happiness comes in acting virtuously.
Virtues • Happiness comes in acting virtuously: • Virtue: • A virtue is a kind of excellence of character. • Virtue and Function: A virtue is “the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.” • A virtue is a state in which a man functions properly… • “every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that thing be done well…the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider…” (NE )
More on virtue • More on virtue: • It is for our virtues and vices that we are praised and blamed. • Not capacities we have by nature. We develop virtues and vices through experience. • We become just be doing just acts (NE 2.1) • We can learn the virtues so “there should be some direction from a very early age, as Plato says, with a view of taking pleasure in, and being pained by, the right things. (NE 2.3) • … • To have a virtue is to have developed a habit of choosing and behaving in ways appropriate…
Examples of Virtues • Some of the virtues include: • Courage. When one is fearful or confident • Temperance (regarding indulgence in pain and pleasure) • Liberality (regarding giving and taking $) • Pride (regarding one’s honor and dishonor) • Good tempered (with regard to anger).
The Doctrine of the mean • Excess and Defect:It is in the nature of things to be destroyed by excess or defect. • “Both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. The man who runs away from everything in fear, and faces up to nothing, becomes a coward; the man who is absolutely fearless, and will walk into anything, becomes rash. It is the same with the man who gets enjoyment from all the pleasures, abstaining from none: he is immoderate; whereas he who avoids all pleasures, like a boor, is a man of no sensitivity…” (NE 2.2) • Intermediate: Every virtue is an intermediate between some excess and defect. • So acting virtuously is acting according to the mean. Never too much excess, nor too much defect with regard to a state of character. • “an intermediate between excess and defect…that which is equidistant from each of the extremes…neither too much nor too little.” • “For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate…” ()
The mean is relative • Relative: But the mean isn’t always the same for everyone. The mean is always relative to the individual and her circumstances. • For “if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this is also perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little…” () • “Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this--the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us. • “In feeling fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain, one can feel too much or too little; and both extremes are wrong. The mean and good is feeling at the right time, about the right things, in relation to the right people, and for the right reason…” (NE 2.6) • The mean is relative to the circumstances…
The mean is relative • So the mean is relative to the individual and her circumstances. • For example, bravery lies on a mean between extremes of fear and confidence. • Too much fear and not enough confidence cowards. • Too much confidence and too little fear reckless. • But the brave act doesn’t lie precisely in the middle of extremes. This depends on the circumstances. • For example: • I walk upon someone getting mugged • I have no training in self defense • A navy seal walks upon someone getting mugged
The Doctrine of the Mean:Examples • So every virtue is the mean between some excess and some defect. For example: • Anger: • You can have too much anger (wrathfulness) or too little (subservience). • Virtuous action lies between the extremes, depends on circumstances… • Temperance the mean between self indulgence and insensibleness (with respect to divulging in pains and pleasures). • Liberality the mean between prodigal-ness and mean-ness (with respect to giving and taking $). • Truthfulness: the mean between boastfulness and mock-modesty (with respect to truth)
Virtue Ethics: a principle for action • We can think of Virtue Ethics as offering us a principle for action: • A Principle for Action: some action X is the right thing to do if and only if X is what a virtuous person would do in those circumstances. • A virtuous person lives by or according to the virtues. • But what would a virtuous person do? • You must try to think like Jesus would … • So you might just ask a virtuous person… • A second possible principle for action: the doctrine of the mean
The virtuous agent • The Virtuous agent: For Aristotle, being a virtuous agent isn’t just doing the virtuous thing. • To be just it isn’t sufficient to just act justly. • Acting for the sake of virtue: one must get pleasure in acting justly for it to count as a just act at all. • “…the man who does not rejoice in noble actions is not even good; since no one would call a man just who did not enjoy acting justly, nor any man liberal who did not enjoy liberal actions…If this is so, virtuous actions must be in themselves pleasant…” ()
The second requirement • Another requirement: And being a virtuous agent is more than merely doing the virtuous thing and gaining pleasure in her doing the virtuous thing. • Resisting the appetitive soul: to be virtuous, one’s appetitive soul, that part of the soul which brings about desires and impulses that pull one away from acting rationally, mustn't lead one away from doing the virtuous thing. • “For we praise the rational principle of the continent man and of the incontinent, and the part of their soul that has such a principle, since it urges them aright and towards the best objects; but there is found in them also another element naturally opposed to the rational principle, which fights against and resists that principle.” () • The virtuous agent is neither continent nor incontinent. • The continent man: does the virtuous thing, although he had some impulse or desire to do otherwise. • The incontinent man: doesn’t do the virtuous thing just because he follows the appetitive soul • Desiring virtue: the virtuous agent desires only to perform the virtuous act
