Aristotle: Life, Work, and Philosophical System
Aristotle: Life and Work
Aristotle
Life and Work
- Born in Stagira in 384 BC.
- His father was a doctor in the royal court of Macedonia.
- At 17, he was admitted to the Academy, where Plato was teaching until his death.
- In 344 BC, he was named preceptor (teacher) of Alexander (the Great).
- After King Alexander’s death, he returned to Athens where he founded his school, the Lyceum.
- After the king’s death, he had to flee Athens, driven by growing anti-Macedonian sentiment.
- He died in 322 BC in Chalcis.
Aristotle’s Extensive Work
Work
- Logic: Organon
- Metaphysics
- Physics: On the Physical Things, On the Sky, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, etc. History of Animals.
- Ethics and Politics: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric.
Cultural and Historical Context
We refer to the historical context of Plato.
- In 359 BC, King Philip ascended to the throne of Macedonia with expansionist zeal in Greece.
- With Alexander, the idea was to create a great empire that reached present-day Iran, ancient Persia.
- The king’s death led to the division of the empire.
A country in continuous war devotes resources to culture, art, or the development of people.
Philosophical Context
He sees his work as an alternative.
Criticism of Plato
Plato: Aristotle criticizes especially the separateness of the ideas about the world of sense. If the ideas are essences of things that exist separately, then they are substances. This creates many difficulties. These are the most significant:
- Attempting to explain this world is doubled, which also doubles the problem.
- If the essence of things is separate from things, it cannot explain them, or in reality, it is not exactly the essence.
- Neither can it explain the origin of ideas and changing things, because it cannot cause what does not communicate with its effect. Perhaps this is why Plato’s cosmology included the demiurge.
- Its shortcomings became the theory of ideas in mathematics, to identify the ideas with numbers or locate the ideal numbers between ideas and things.
It falls in the unity between philosophy and politics.
He collapses the dialectical method.
Aristotle gives two great achievements of Plato:
- His teleological sense.
- The conception of science as knowledge of essences, ideas, or forms separate from things for Aristotle.
Democritus
- He rejected the vacuum and chance.
- The alternative is the power theory and teleology.
- No resignation to the value of sensitive knowledge.
- Understand that the science of sensible things is possible.
Aristotle’s Philosophical System
Three goals:
- Try to solve the social or individual issues related to the pursuit of happiness.
- Keep the ability to do science to discover the order and regularity in the sensible world from knowledge.
- From the knowledge defined, understand the sensitive nature of the things of man.
Science
Does man know that things exist, why they exist, and how they exist?
- Maintains that we can know reality and pass on that knowledge.
- All men by nature desire to know. But not all knowledge is scientific; you have to distinguish different degrees of knowledge:
Degrees of Knowledge
Feeling: The knowledge gained through the senses. It is basic, for knowledge begins with the senses.
Memory: The preservation of the observations. The basis for learning.
Experience: Through memory, feelings give rise to repeated experience. It is characteristic of experts. Does not transcend the sensible things. Responds to “what” but not “why.”
Art (techne): It is a knowledge that is derived from experience. It is the artists’ own knowledge. Goes beyond the particular things, can get universal concepts, can respond to why that is.
Technique: Recombination of experience, memory, and feelings.
Science: A more perfect knowledge than art, as it is based on universal concepts that do not apply to the manufacture of objects. Science is the first causes and principles from which other things are known. It is knowledge by causes, necessary and universal, and therefore, true and certain.