Reference
- Aristotle 384-322 BCEAristotle was one of the world's greatest thinkers, whose profound influence on western philosophy and philosophical terminology continues to this day. Born in Stagira, at that time in Macedonia, in 384 BCE, the son of a doctor who was physician to the Royal Family, he studied for 20 years at Plato's Academy in Athens, before being invited by King Philip II of Macedon to become tutor to his son Alexander (‘the Great’).
Returning to Athens in 335 BCE, Aristotle founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum, and his surviving works are considered to be his lecture notes, collected and edited by his pupils and others during the centuries after his death. His best known philosophical works are the Metaphysics, de Anima (on the Soul), Politics, and Ethics. Aristotle's interests did not however end with philosophy - he wrote extensively on topics as diverse as education, psychology, grammar and linguistics, and on different aspects of science, particularly biology, and he put forward a cosmology to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies which was not superseded until Ptolemy. But as Jonathan Barnes points out, Aristotle has not always had a good press. Because his works were never edited for publication as connected narratives, Aristotle is difficult to read. Perhaps partly for this reason, since antiquity his writings have been the subject of endless critical analysis and comment, a process still gathering momentum at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Aristotle's writings (the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics in particular) inspired St Thomas Aquinas, who in his great work Summa Theologiae set out to reconcile Aristotle's system of logic and natural law with the Christian worldview and, through Aquinas, the pagan Aristotle can be seen to have influenced Roman Catholic theology through the centuries to the present day.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle is concerned to discover the first principles or causes of things (arche). The true essence of a thing consists in its function rather than in the matter of which it is made. With this principle in mind, as a biologist, Aristotle was primarily interested in discovering how things are as they are, rather than why they exist as they do. Rejecting Plato's theory of forms or ideas, he considered that a thing which does not physically exist cannot in any coherent sense be susceptible to discussion. His scientific works are thus attempts, grounded in empirical observation, to account for phenomena.
However, as scientists are still inclined to do, Aristotle was not above selecting evidence to fit his pre-existing pet theories. Nonetheless, Aristotle was a meticulous observer of the natural world and some of his recorded observations of fish and other sea creatures were not subsequently rediscovered and proved until the middle of the nineteenth century. His taxonomy of plants and animals anticipates that of Linnaeus...
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Perspectives
The Lagoon
A brilliant study of Aristotle as biologist The philosophical classics of Aristotle loom large over the history of Western thought, but the subject he most loved was biology. He wrote vast volumes about animals. He described them, classified them, told us where and how they live and how they develop in the womb or in the egg. He founded a science. It can even be said that he founded science itself. In The Lagoon, acclaimed biologist Armand Marie Leroi recovers Aristotle's science. He revisits Aristotle's writings and the places where he worked. He goes to the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos to see the creatures that Aristotle saw, where he saw them. He explores Aristotle's observations, his deep ideas, his inspired guesses--and the things he got wildly wrong. He shows how Aristotle's science is deeply intertwined with his philosophical system and reveals that he was not only the first biologist, but also one of the greatest. The Lagoon is both a travelogue and a study of the origins of science. And it shows how a philosopher who lived almost two millennia ago still has so much to teach us today.
Aristotle
In this excellent introduction, Christopher Shields introduces and assesses the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, showing how his powerful conception of human nature shaped much of his thinking on the nature of the soul and the mind, ethics, politics and the arts. Beginning with a brief biography, Christopher Shields carefully explains the fundamental elements of Aristotle's thought: his explanatory framework, his philosophical methodology and his four-causal explanatory scheme. Subsequently he discusses Aristotle's metaphysics and the theory of categories and logical theory and his conception of the human being and soul and body. In the last part, he concentrates on Aristotle's value theory as applied to ethics and politics, and assesses his approach to happiness, virtues and the best life for human beings. He concludes with an appraisal of Aristotelianism today.
A Companion to Aristotle
The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle provides in-depth studies of the main themes of Aristotle's thought, from art to zoology. The most comprehensive single volume survey of the life and work of Aristotle Comprised of 40 newly commissioned essays from leading experts Coves the full range of Aristotle's work, from his 'theoretical' inquiries into metaphysics, physics, psychology, and biology, to the practical and productive "sciences" such as ethics, politics, rhetoric, and art
Introduction to Formal Logic
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window
Having looked at validity in inductive arguments, now examine what makes deductive arguments valid. Learn that it all started with Aristotle, who devised rigorous methods for determining with absolute certainty whether a conclusion must be true given the truth of its premises.
Classical Greece
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThree researchers (Josiah Ober, Richard Janko, Susan Wolf) shed light on different aspects of the Classical Greek World, from the workings of Athenian democracy, to Aristotle's philosophical method, to the place of religion in Classical Athens after the Peloponnesian War.
Aristotle - The Highest Good
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowExplore Aristotle's search for the "highest good." It is a search that takes you through his famous "function argument" and offers an explanation of the comprehensive state of being known as eudaimonea, the fully flourishing life that may well elude evaluation until long after death.
Online Resources
- Aristotle on Intelligent PerceptionAristotle presents perception as a potentially intelligent form of cognition—a form of cognition that allows us to respond in discerning, knowing ways to a range of different situations, and develop certain theoretical insights relevant to some inquiry. But it’s not clear how we should understand the interaction between our rational and perceptual powers in these cases, or how widespread we should take their interaction to be. In this paper I argue against interpretations on which human perception would be an inherently rational power. I then develop an alternative view of intelligent perception that seeks to do justice to the role Aristotle assigns nonrational uses of perception in his account of our learning, and to his emphasis on the continuity between animal and human forms of cognition. On the view I develop, our rational powers allow us to develop a reflective understanding of the knowledge we acquire by purely perceptual means—a reflective understanding that can then affect what we recognize perceptually, and thereby yield forms of action and insight unavailable to other animals.
- Aristotle on Potential DensityIn this paper we attempt to clear out the ground concerning the Aristotelian notion of density. Aristotle himself appears to confuse mathematical density with that of mathematical continuity. In order to enlighten the situation we discuss the Aristotelian notions of infinity and continuity. At the beginning, we deal with Aristotle’s views on the infinite with respect to addition as well as to division. In the sequel, we focus our attention to points and discuss their status with respect to the actuality–potentiality distinction. Then we focus our attention to the nature of continuity, which Aristotle tends to consider as leading to infinite divisibility and potential density of the extended.
Aristotle on Life - The Big Picture
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowShift your perspective from India to the roots of Western thought about life's meaning by beginning your study of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. This introductory lecture sets out the framework of Aristotle's view, as set forth in the lecture notes kept by his son and pupil, Nichomacheus.