Aristotle’s Philosophy: Substance, Logic, and Metaphysics
Aristotle (384-322 BC), Macedonia
Aristotle was first and foremost a naturalist and biologist devoted to the observation and study of nature. He tried to explain reality without recourse to the supernatural. Aristotle’s philosophy leaves the world of separate, transcendent ideas and focuses on the world witnessed by the real senses.
His main claim to fame is based on logic, the set of binding rules that allow the use of coherent discourse.
He was able to make the instrument (organon) of thought capable of mastering his encyclopedic knowledge. A thinker of different specificity, he organized and classified concepts into categories.
The Aristotelian system became the backbone of every Christian and Muslim scholastic in the Middle Ages, freezing the model for all future systematization.
In metaphysics, Aristotle recognizes the limits of any system, the incompleteness of any irreducible pattern of synthesis, and the thought of being.
Aristotle’s writings are divided into two groups: works published by him that are lost today and works that were not published by him but have been preserved.
II. Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Ideas
Aristotle devotes much space in his Metaphysics to criticizing Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Probably his disagreement with his teacher was the cause of his leaving the Academy. The theory of ideas was based on the Socratic effort to identify and define the essence of things (especially of the virtues). Defining an essence – “what a thing is” – gets its general concept or universal.
This attempt to separate the character attributed to the essence is what Aristotle could not accept. If ideas are essences of things that exist separately, then they are substances (realities that have independent existence). In this sense, his criticisms are:
1. To try to explain one world, Plato doubles it (World of Ideas and “World-sensitive”), and this makes the task doubly difficult: now you also have to explain the second.
2. The world of ideas cannot explain anything about the world of things. If the essences of things are separate from the things themselves, then they are not properly their essence: “if they were the essence of things, things would be.” Plato said that things participate in or mimic the ideas, but “to say that the ideas are paradigms or models, and that things participate in them, is nothing but empty words and building pronounce poetic metaphors.
3. Nor do the ideas help explain the origin, evolution, and changes of things, as they are eternal and immutable.
4. Aristotle also lashes out against the mathematization of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, which makes it Pythagorean. In short, Aristotle’s criticism focuses on rejecting that the essence of things exists apart from them. But he does not entirely reject the Theory of Ideas; he only denies its separate existence. It seems that, in essence, Aristotle remains faithful to the Platonic and Socratic legacy: science is about the general and universal; it is a common search for the essence that is in the things themselves and not separate from them.
III. Logic
Aristotle was the creator of logic, although it had its precedent in Plato’s dialectic. Logic is the instrument of science, as Aristotle thinks that there is no science but of the universal and necessary (in this, he remains true to the Socratic and Platonic heritage). Science, he says, deduces the particular reality from the universal (that is their cause). The syllogism is a formal structure that allows this connection. Aristotle defines it as “a discourse in which, once granted certain things, different ones necessarily continue or conclude.” The syllogism expresses a relation of inclusion, showing how the particular is included in the universal. The syllogism has three terms: the first or higher (A), the middle (B), and the lowest (C). For example: “Every man (B) is mortal (A)”, “Socrates (C) is a man (B)”, and then “Socrates (C) is mortal (A).” In Aristotle, the logic of the syllogism replaces the Platonic dialectic. But apart from the syllogism, Aristotle turned to induction as a method to discover the universal. While the syllogism proceeds deductively (ranging from universal to particular), induction is the reverse (going from the particular to the universal). If we know all of the cases and draw a general conclusion, the induction is complete. If we know only one or a few particular cases, then it is an incomplete induction. Induction serves to grasp the first principles of science, the universal.
IV. Metaphysics
Also called by Aristotle “wisdom” or “first philosophy.” The name “metaphysics” is due to Andronicus of Rhodes, the compiler of his work, who used that name because they were the books after the books on physics in his arrangement. Aristotle attributed to a first philosophy a purely speculative basis, without putting it in relation to the pursuit of happiness and virtuous life, as Plato did. Instead, he talks of a “second philosophy” dedicated to the study of virtue and happiness: ethics. If you can only have universal science, metaphysics deals with the most universal, “being qua being and its essential attributes.” The other sciences only deal with being from a particular point of view and are therefore called “special sciences.” Since the first philosophy deals with the whole of being, it is an ontology (“science of being”).
1. Being
For Aristotle, there are ways of “being”; being is said in many ways, but all refer to a form paramount, “being” itself: the substance. And the substance is not unique, because there are many (many different “things”). All other ways of being are only modifications or accidents of substance: quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, status, action, and passion. These are the supreme categories of being. The categories are the various ways in which something can be referred to as a predicate to a subject, so they are the various ways that you can say “be.” Therefore, they are the various ways in which we can say that something is (= that “is A” or “is B”).
2. The Substance and Accidents
Aristotle observed that after the appearance changes that affect almost every object, there is always something unchanged. That which remains the same and unchanged, the substrate material that is impervious to change, is the substance. The substance is the “physis,” nature, or the fundamental principle of being. For example, water is still water regardless of condition, solid, liquid, or gas. The substance has an entity in itself; it is the real support on which all other changing qualities of things rest. These accidents are changing qualities (color, hardness of a material, shape, temperature, etc.). Aristotle distinguishes two types of substances: first substances (specific individuals, like Socrates, the lamp, or holder) and second substances (the form or universal “human,” “animal,” “vegetable,” etc.). Strictly speaking, only specific individuals should be regarded as substances. But since the species and genera are also real, not mere concepts, which science deals with, they also must be considered substances, although there is no separate primary substance (of individuals), but in it (specific individuals). Therefore, the primary substance is the truly real; the substance in the truest sense is the ultimate subject or substrate, as it has its existence. So the primary substance “underlies all things.”
3. The Matter and Form
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Unlike Plato, Aristotle admits that the substance may be subject to critical development processes and becoming (genesis), as frequently observed in the embryos of birds, mammals and reptiles. Thus, the primary substance is not simply a static (an eternal Idea in Plato), but a reality capable of development, evolution, improve and grow. He is a poor, born and may die. The best way that Aristotle found to explain this property of the substance, of individuals
concrete, was considered a composite material (Hyle) and shape (morph).
1. How is the essence of the thing, the secondary substance, species, and is eternal. But only available on the subject. The form is the most universal of things and something intrinsic to them. Aristotle gives priority to form over substance: The considered the true essence of the individual.
2. Matter is, for example, bronze or wood. These things matter Aristotle called next or second, perceptible by the senses. Supports any form. But it also speaks of a raw material absolutely indeterminate, formless, quality or extent, unable to exist independently. This notion recalls Anaximander apeiron, or primordial matter of the Timaeus. It would be something like the ultimate substrate of all matter, which would be bronze as an essence or shape. This raw material would also be eternal, but imperceptible to the senses, only by intelligence. Hylomorphic or theory is called hylomorphic this philosophical doctrine that considers the natural physical and concrete reality consists of matter and form. Only physical entities as a tree, a house or a mammal having matter and form. But abstract concepts such as goodness, justice and joy.
Aristotle gives priority to the way it is, at once: 1) the essenceof everything, 2) the nature or “principle” inherent activity. Only way is definable and knowable.