Study Guide to an Introduction to Aristotle

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781645424376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for an Introduction to Aristotle, a philosopher whose ideas were largely a product of Greek culture.As a commentary of ancient literature, the Introduction to Aristotle summarizes the topics and philosophical concepts in the author's works. Moreover, it comments on themes such as unity, reason, politics, and ethics. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Aristotle's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

ARISTOTLE

INTRODUCTION

Aristotle was a product of Greek culture. Before the Greeks came into the Mediterranean world, man was primarily oriented toward death and built his monuments in honor of death. The ziggurats of Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt testify to the hold of death upon these early civilizations. To the Greeks, however, life was the most significant fact in the world, and human life was the greatest wonder on earth. The Greeks were the first people to play. Their famous Olympic Games are witness to their boundless enthusiasm for living. Their art speaks of the pleasure they derived from the form of the human body. The Greeks were also the first philosophers. Man was a miracle above the other creatures because he possessed what they called logos. Logos in Greek means a word by which a thought is expressed. It can also mean the thought itself, or reason. The Greeks were the first people to say that the world was knowable, because they believed in man’s power of reason. They had no idea of changing their own life or the world around them through the knowledge acquired by reason. The world was something to be understood and admired as it was. Through understanding the nature of the universe and the nature of man, a Greek believed he had the key to understanding man’s own place in the scheme of things.

THE IONIAN SCHOOL

In classical times this school was famous as one which sought scientific answers to questions about nature. Because the school was mainly concerned with observing nature, its followers were called phusikoi or natural philosophers. Phusis is the Greek word for nature, from which is derived our word physics.

Thales and Anaximander

Some six centuries before Christ, on the island of Miletus in the Aegean Sea, a man called Thales asked the question: “What is the world made of?” He had looked around himself and seen a world where things were changing all the time. The tide came in and went out. A tree grew where a seed had been. He thought there must be something unchanging and permanent beneath all the change. Beneath the world of life and death there must be some basic substance which explained and made possible everything else. Instead of turning to religion, Thales tried to give a scientific explanation and decided that the first substance was water. His pupil, Anaximander, said that the first substance was a lump of matter which had no form, shape, or definite character of any kind. He called this first matter The Unlimited. Its chief characteristic was that it was always in motion. How did our world evolve from this shapeless lump? Anaximander’s theory was that the world is a battlefield where opposites are constantly fighting each other, encroaching on one another. At some time in the past while basic matter was whirling through space, four basic opposites-hot and cold, and wet and dry-separated themselves out. The cold and wet went into the center of the whirling mass of matter to become the earth. The hot and dry moved toward the edge and formed rings of fire around the mass. Mist rising from the earth prevented the rings of fire from being seen on the earth. Man could only see the flames peeping through the fog in the forms of the sun, the moon, and the stars. But even before man appeared, the heat dried up the wet to form land. Life was the result of the action of heat on moisture. Life first appeared in the ocean; eventually man evolved from fish that took to dry land. This theory may well be considered a precursor to Darwin’s account of evolution.

Anaximenes

Another pupil of Thales named Anaximenes held that the world was not made of either water, or indefinite matter. It was made of air. Observing how air condensed to form rain, he said that the earth and ocean were formed that way. The wet fell toward the center, while the purer air remained in the heavens. Like the other early philosophers, Anaximenes believed that the universe was alive in the same way that man is alive. He accounted for man’s particular form of life, the life of reason, by saying that the soul of man was formed from the very pure air which had remained at the farthest edge of the universe.

One problem which these early philosophers faced was why the first substance of the universe, be it water, matter or air, formed the world at all. What first set things in motion? Since they thought all matter was alive, they said that the first substance was self-moving. Not only did it cause motion in other things, it was the cause of its own motion. It produced life and was life at the same time. Because it moved itself, they said it was divine.

HERACLITUS

Later philosophers continued the Ionian tradition. Following in the steps of Anaximander, a thinker from the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor by the name of Heraclitus held in the fifth century B.C. that the world was the scene of the conflict of opposites. He too was impressed by the instability and changing character of the physical world. But he disagreed with Anaximander’s view that the strife which characterizes the world is something disorderly or unjust.

Concept of Unity

“Strife,” he said, “is the justice of the world.” The existence of this conflict of opposing forces, in his view, is essential to the existence of the One, or God. In accordance with this attitude, he held that “ever-lasting fire,” not air, or water, or the unlimited, is the essence of all things, because it exhibits the most continuous state of tension. “All things are in flux,” he said. Being the most fluctuating of all things, fire is therefore the essential reality of the universe. Heraclitus explained change by saying that it is the upward and the downward path of fire by virtue of which the universe came into being. The relative stability of the world, he said, is due to different “measures” of the ever-lasting fire, some being kindled (burning upward) and some burning out (going downward) in more or less equal proportions. The balance between the upward and downward paths of the different “measures” of fire forms what Heraclitus called the “hidden attunement” of the universe. This is an attunement of opposite tensions, he said, “like that of a bow and a lyre.” Thus Heraclitus saw the harmony of the world as the resolution of many diverse tensions in the unity of the one reality, which is fire. This concept of unity in diversity, of the One as Many, is Heraclitus’ most significant contribution to philosophy. He himself felt that his special “Word,” or message, to mankind was the knowledge that “all things are one.”

Importance of Reason

A second aspect of Heraclitus’ philosophy is his idea of the One, or God as an all-ordering Reason, a universal law present in all things. This view led him to emphasize the value of man’s reason, which he considered the fiery element in man and thus a moment of Universal Reason. In his “Word” he urged men to live by reason. He was one of the first philosophers to suggest that we cannot rely wholly on our powers of observation. Our senses often trick us. Only by trying to see the world from the viewpoint of Universal Reason, he said, can man understand the hidden laws of the universe that “all things are one,” and that “War . . . is the father . . . of all things.”

PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS

A second school which greatly influenced the course of Greek philosophy, and particularly Aristotle’s famous teacher, Plato, was the school of Pythagoras of Samos, another island in the Aegean Sea. Little is known about the life of the school’s founder. It seems Pythagoras left his native Samos about 530 B.C. and settled in Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy. There he founded a religious brotherhood. Legend says that Pythagoras performed miracles. He was also very interested in mathematics, and seems to have been the first man to treat mathematics as a science. One of his contributions to mathematics is known to us today as the Pythagorean Formula: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. The importance he gave to numbers was upheld by his followers, many of whom thought numbers were divine.

Pythagorean Philosophy

First, Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls. Each soul comes from God, in Whose image it is made, and to Whom it will at last return when it has been cleansed of sin. Until that time, each soul enters into the body of a plant or animal, stays there until it dies, and then enters another body, and then another. Second, if God and the human soul have similar natures, then the structure of man and the structure of the universe must be based on the same principle. The human soul is the cause of order in man, as God is the cause of order in the universe. His soul, which makes man one complete being, is finite; it has a definite form. The One which unifies the world must likewise be definite, i.e., finite and limited, else its form could not be reproduced in miniature in the soul of man. This view of the relation between God and man made the Pythagoreans identify order, goodness and beauty with the idea of Limit or Form, and disorder and evil with the Unlimited or Formless. Their word for universe was kosmos, which itself meant order or arrangement. Finally, the similarity between the whole and its parts can be expressed in terms of some proportion supposed to exist between the whole and its part, and the part and its parts. One result of Pythagoras’ interest in proportion was the numerical ratios of the octave (2:1), the fifth (3:2), and the fourth (4:3) in the musical scale. As the musical scale is defined and limited by these numerical ratios, so every whole is made by the action of Limit (order) upon the Unlimited. The correct proportion between the whole and its parts was the cause of beauty in the object, and was called harmony, meaning perfect arrangement. Aristotle in his Metaphysics attacks the latter Pythagorean idea that numerical ratios can be the cause of anything.

Number is the First Substance of the Universe

The realization that all things are numerable, and can be related to each other in a numerical proportion is one factor which led the Pythagoreans to their emphasis on the value of number in explaining the world order. If musical harmony is dependent on number, world harmony must also be dependent on number, they thought. Most probably they assumed that the conflict of opposites in the world (which the natural philosophers had observed) could be resolved in terms of number. If, as they thought, Limit is what gives form to the Unlimited and can be expressed in a numerical proportion, number must obviously play a significant role in the world. Such thinking contributed to the Pythagorean position that all things are numbers. But to understand this theory better, we must also look at their view of numbers. Most scholars agree that the Pythagoreans thought of numbers spatially. For example, in their view one is the point; two is the line; three is the surface; and four is the solid. To say that all things are numbers is thus another way of saying that everything that exists consists of points, or units in space, which taken together make a number. In making number the first substance of the world, the Pythagoreans most likely transferred these mathematical conceptions to material reality. Consequently, they said that points, lines, and surfaces are the real units from which all bodies in the world are made. Every material body, in fact, is a solid (i.e., it is an expression of the number four). It is difficult to say which aspect of Pythagorean science most influenced the theory that basic reality is number: their research into the nature of musical sound or their geometrical view of numbers. That their theory was taken seriously is evident from the fact that Aristotle devotes a good part of his work on the nature of being to the refutation of the idea that mathematical concepts have a concrete, substantial existence.

The Identity of Harmony with Good Order

This was the main contribution to Greek philosophy by the Pythagoreans. They approached all things with the purpose of finding the right relation between the whole or the One, and its parts (the Many). Medicine, for instance, was the science which brought about harmony, or the good ordering, of the parts or vital fluids of the body. Pythagoras’ view that health was the right harmony of the body became the ideal of Greek medicine. One of the problems of this distinction between the whole and its parts, and the One and the Many (a problem which Heraclitus did not have) is that Pythagoras could find no way of explaining how the Many could have come from the One. The question of unity and diversity plays a large part in Aristotle’s own philosophy.

Matter and Form

The difference between the Ionian School and the so-called Italian School of Pythagoras lay in their different approaches. The Ionians asked, “What is the world made of?” The Pythagoreans asked, “What is its structure?” Thus, the Ionians said the basic world substance was some kind of self-moving matter. The Pythagoreans saw number or form as the first principle. Both schools were led to make a definite distinction between matter and form. Aristotle inherited this problem of the relation between matter and form. His solution provides the key to his philosophy.

In thinking of matter and form, we must not make the mistake of thinking that form simply means the shape of an object, and that matter means the stuff from which the object is made. To think in this way would be to misunderstand the problems the Greek philosophers were trying to solve. The Greek word for form comes from a verb which can mean both to see and to know. The form of anything was that which was knowable about it. When you wanted to say what was knowable about an object you gave it logos and definition. But no object is the same as its definition. The Greek philosophers were trying to find some way of making their system of language fit the structure of thought to reflect accurately the nature of reality. The early Ionian philosophers thought the problem was relatively simple. Just divide up the natural world into its elements, and you will have found the nature of reality. By the time of Heraclitus, men were thinking that the question was more difficult. Perhaps our senses cannot be trusted to tell us about reality. Only the way we think can give us any information about the nature of things. The Pythagoreans thought things were best understood through their intelligible structure. They said that what could be known about an object was what you could say about it in numbers.

Parmenides

The real break between language and thought on the one hand, and the sensible world on the other, came with a pupil of the Pythagoreans named Parmenides (c. 540-470 B.C.). Parmenides was particularly impressed with the vital contrast which existed between Being and Non-Being. The basic tenet of his philosophy reveals his fundamental approach to the problem of being. “It [i.e., Being],” he said, “is.” “Non-Being is not and cannot be thought.” In other words, man cannot think something which is nothing. He cannot think Non-Being. This means that whatever I say, or whatever I think is; it exists. Reality is not primarily what can be experienced by the senses. It is what you think it is, as stated in language. For reasons which follow, the sensible world, the world which is familiar to all of us, is not, in Parmenides’ view, the real world at all. The result of this theory was to divide philosophy henceforth into two camps. Some said that all sensible things were thought. Others held that all thought was sensible things. No one could say that the sensible world and the world of thought were one world any longer. Reason and sense had split the world in two.

Being is Eternal and Indivisible

It would be a mistake to believe that Parmenides’ important distinctions between reason and sense, and truth and appearance made him an idealist. His notion of Being was not an abstract concept. He thought of Being as a space-filling mass. Being is the full, he said; Non-Being is therefore empty space. From this basic idea he derived his other theories of being: 1) Being always is. It cannot have a beginning nor cease to be, because it cannot come from Non-Being. 2) Being is continuous and undivided. Being is one and indivisible because it is everywhere the same. Since Being is, there is nothing that exists which can divide it. 3) Being is unchanging and unmoving. The fact that the verb “to be” in Greek means both “to be” and “to exist” (the distinction between the two meanings had not yet been made clear) supported Parmenides’ argument that there can be no change and no motion. “To change” means that something becomes what it is not. Since “to be” meant “to exist” for Parmenides, he said that it was impossible for something which is, (i.e., exists) to become what it is not (i.e., not to exist). Similarly, Being is unmoving; “to move” means that something moves into a space where something is not (i.e., does not exist). But Being is the full. Therefore, empty space, or a space where nothing is (a space of Non-Being) logic...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Aristotle
• 2) Aristotle’s Works and Method
• 3) The Physics
• 4) The Ethics
• 5) The Metaphysics
• 6) The Politics
• 7) The Poetics
• 8) Questions and Answers for Review
• 9) Bibliography