Aristotle was born in the small Macedonian town of Stagira in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, who died while Aristotle was still quite young, was physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. When Aristotle was seventeen, his uncle, Proxenus, sent him to study at the Academy, where he remained for twenty years, initially as a student, eventually as a researcher and teacher.
On Plato's death in 347 BCE, Aristotle left Athens for Assos in Asia Minor. Three years later he moved to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, and two years after that he became tutor to the thirteen-year-old Alexander of Macedon - later the Great. In 335, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum. Alexander died in 323, with the result that anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens grew in strength.
Perhaps for that reason, Aristotle left for Chalcis in Euboea, where he died twelve months later at the age of sixty-two. A list of Aristotle's papers, probably made in the third century BCE, seems to describe most of his extant writings, as well as a number of works, some in dialogue form, that are now lost. When Sulla captured Athens in 87 BCE, these papers were taken to Rome, where they were edited, organized into different treatises, and arranged in a logical sequence by Andronicus of Rhodes in around 30 BCE. Most of the
writings he thought to be genuinely Aristotelian have been transmitted to us via manuscript copies produced between the ninth and sixteenth centuries CE. These writings may be classified as follows:
- Logic, dialectic, metaphysics: Categories, on Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics, on Sophistical Refutations, Metaphysics.
- Science and philosophy of science: Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, Generation of Animals.
- Psychology and philosophy of mind: De Anima, Sense and Sensibilia, On Memory, On Sleep, On Dreams, On Divination in Sleep, On Length and Shortness of Life, On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration.
- Ethics, politics, philosophy of art: Nicomachean Ethics, Magna Moralia, Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Constitution of Athens, Poetics.
Of the various things in the world described in Aristotle's writings, some have a nature, an internal source of movement, growth, and alteration (Physics, 192b8-9, 13-15). Thus, for example, a feline embryo has within it a causal nexus that explains why it grows into a cat, why that cat moves and alters in the ways it does, and why it eventually decays and dies. A house or any other artifact, by contrast, has no such source within it. This nature is the same as the thing's essence (to ti en einai) or function (ergon), which is the same as its end (telos). Indeed, its end just is to actualize its nature by performing its function. Aristotle's view of natural things is therefore teleological: he sees them as being defined by an end for which they are striving, and as needing to have their behavior explained by reference to it. It is this end, essence, or function that fixes what the good for that being consists in, and what its perfections or virtues are (Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a7-20, Physics, 195a23-25).
Many natural things, as well as the products of art or craft, are hylomorphic compounds, compounds of matter (hule) and form (morphe). Statues are examples: their matter is the stone or metal from which they are made; their form is their shape. Human beings are also examples: their matter is (roughly speaking) their body; their soul is their form. Thus a human soul is not something separable from a human body, but is more like the structural organization responsible for the body's being alive and functioning appropriately.
This soul consists of distinct, hierarchically organized constituents (Nicomachean Ethics, 1.13). The lowest rung in the hierarchy is vegetative soul, which is responsible for nutrition and growth, and which is also found in plants and other animals. At the next rung up, we find appetitive soul, which is responsible for perception, imagination, and movement, and so is present in other animals too, but not in plants. This sort of soul lacks reason but, unlike the vegetative, can be influenced by it. The third element in the human soul is reason, which is further divided into the scientific element, which enables us to contemplate or engage in theoretical activity, and the calculative or deliberative element, which enables us to engage in practical or political activity.
Because a human soul contains these different elements, the human good might be defined by properties exemplified by all three of them or by properties exemplified by only some of them. In the famous function argument, Aristotle argues for the latter alternative: the human good is happiness, which is "an active life of the element that has a rational principle" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a3-4). The problem is that the scientific and the deliberative elements both fit this description. Human happiness might, therefore, consist in practical political activity, or in contemplative theorizing, or in a mixture of both. Even a brief glance at Nicomachean Ethics X.6-8 will reveal how hard it is to determine which of these Aristotle has in mind.
The various sciences Aristotle recognizes are what provide us with knowledge of the world, how to live successfully in it, and how to produce what we need to do so.
Hence they fall into three distinct types:
- Theoretical sciences: theology, philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences.
- Practical sciences: ethics, household management, statesmanship, which is divided into legislation and politics, with politics being further divided into deliberative science and judicial science
- Productive sciences (crafts, arts): medicine, building, etc.
a theoretically scientific core, but as not being reducible to it.
Each Aristotelian theoretical science deals with a genus or natural class of beings having forms or essences. When appropriately regimented, it may be set out as a structure of demonstrations, the indemonstrable first principles of which are definitions of those essences. More precisely, the first principles special to a science are like this. Others that are common to all sciences, such as the principle of noncontradiction and other logical principles, have a somewhat different character. Since all these first principles are necessary truths, and demonstration is necessitypreserving syllogistic deduction, scientific theorems are also necessary.
Though we cannot grasp a first principle by demonstrating it from yet more primitive principles, it must, if we are to have any unqualified scientific knowledge at all, be "better known" to us than any of the science's other theorems. This better knowledge is provided by intuition (nous) and the process by which principles come
within intuition's ken is induction (Nicomachean Ethics, 1139b28-9, 1141a7-8).
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