Aristotle was born in Stagria in Northern Greece in 384BCE He studied with Plato in the later’s Academy in Athens for 20 years, until Plato’s death. He returned to northern Greece in 335BCE to be the tutor to Philip II of Macedon’s son Alexander (later Alexander the Great). Aristotle returned to Athens in the same year to teach Philosophy there, but when Alexander died in 323, Aristotle was charged with “impiety” by the Athenians, who were enemies of Macedonia. Aristotle escaped but died a year later in 322, aged 62. Aristotle was married twice. By his second wife he had a son, Nicomachus, after whom is named his most famous ethical work, the Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle made lasting contributions to all areas of Philosophy, including Metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. Some of his works take the form of finished treatises, while others are more like lecture notes or drafts for future work. Although the unfinished nature of Aristotle’s text can make it difficult to summarize his views on some subjects, in the core areas there remains a clear and strong vision of philosophy and the world that deserves the name “Aristotelian”.
The Metaphysics
In the most famous painting of Philosophers, Raphael’s the school of Athens, Aristotle and Plato are portrayed at the centre of a group of Greek philosophers. Plato’s finger points upwards, while Aristotle’s hand is held at waist height, stretched out towards the ground. This image symbolically encapsulates the difference between these two philosophers: while Plato took the genuinely real to be outside of experience, the world of Platonic forms, Aristotle believed that real things, which he called “substances”, are in the world around us. This is why so much of Aristotle’s work covers topics that would now be the subject of empirical science- animal biology, the weather, planetary motion and so on. With his commitment to the reality of the ordinary things that we experience and his tireless need to classify, Aristotle was the first great systematic scientist of the Western World.
Aristotle’s view that substances are the fundamental realities was put forward in his famous work, the Metaphysics. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle approaches the question of what it is for anything to be by describing the nature of the most fundamental beings, those he called substances. The word substance has been used in many ways in philosophy, but in its most important use, a substance is an individual particular thing, such as an individual human being, for instance. This use of the term derives from Aristotle. For him, each individual substance is a combination of shapeless matter organized by what he called its form. Aristotle’s view that the forms of things are in the things themselves is therefore a major difference between his views and those of Plato.
For Aristotle, the form of a substance is what makes the substance the thing it is; therefore it is also called the essence of the substance. For example, an axe is made up of matter organized in a certain way by its form so that it can be used for chopping; thus to be used for chopping is the essence of an axe. If it lost the ability to chop, then it would be an axe only in name, as Aristotle puts it. The essence of a substance is expressed by its characteristic activity in this case by chopping. Further, a substance has this characteristic activity as its goal or purpose. For Aristotle, then, everything real had a purpose. Hence Aristotle’s theory of substance, which effectively dominated metaphysics until Descartes’ revolutionary ideas of the 17th century, is sometimes called a teleological theory: it describes a substance in of its characteristic goal, or telos.
The Soul
Aristotle employed his distinction between form and matter to answer the question of the relation between the soul and the body. His general view was that the soul is the form of the body’s matter. But Aristotle’a conception of the soul was very different from that which later developed following Descartes’ innovations.
For Aristotle, all living things have souls, but these souls are not all of the same kind: the nutritive vegetative soul is responsible for growth and reproduction; the sensitive soul for perception and sensation, and the rational soul for thought and reasoning. Plants have only a nutritive soul, while animals have nutritive and sensitive souls, and humans have these plus the rational soul. These three parts of the soul can be thought of as the forms or governing principal of the characteristic activities of a living thing. It is hard to classify Aristotle’s view of mind and body in of the modern distinction between materialism and dualism. On the one hand, the soul has to have a material basis in the body: it is the form of the body’s matter. But on the other hand, the soul or mind is not to be identified with the matter of the body: Aristotle explained the workings of the body in of the soul and not vice versa.
Logic and the syllogism
Aristotle’s systematizing approach extended to reasoning itself. Aristotle was the first philosopher to develop a system for studying the structure of logical reasoning, and for hundreds of years Aristotle’s ideas constituted the heart of logic. These days however the logical theories of Bertrand Russel and Gottlob Frege are considered to have superseded Aristotle’s logic.
One of the best known among Aristotle’s many achievements in logic is his discussion of the syllogism, which he defined as “a discourse in which certain things have been stated, something else follows of necessity from their being so”. What Aristotle was attempting to do in considering the different styles of syllogism was to classify examples of reasoning by their form alone - that is, without considering the specific content of the words. For Example a syllogism can have the general form:
All As are B
All Bs are C
Therefore: All As are C
Any argument with this general form is correct, because “All As are C” follows no matter what words we substitute for A, B, C. Aristotle thought that any argument where the conclusion follows from the premises can be represented as a syllogism.
However, this is now known to be false: a syllogism in Aristotle’s sense can contain only general - that is, not specific names for individual things, such as “Aristotle”, but only words that apply to many things like “white”. Ironically, perhaps the most famous example of a “syllogism” of all time - “All men mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal” - is not a syllogism in Aristotle’s sense at all, since it contains the name “Socrates”.
Well-being
Aristotle’s philosophy was not just concerned with abstract questions of logic and metaphysics. In his ethical writings, he was also deeply concerned with practical questions about how to live. His ethical theory aims to provide an of eudaimonia - that is, well-being, or “the good life”. Aristotle’s view was that one should achieve well-being by living life in accordance with the virtues - traits of character such as courage, generosity or humility. Virtues are identified as a “golden mean” located midway between two vices. Thus, courage is located between the two vices of foolhardiness and cowardice; humility between false modesty and boastfulness; and generosity between meanness and profligacy. This attractive conception of the well-lived life does not depend on the particular traits Aristotle took to be virtues, but this does not undermine the general .
Aristotle’s political views developed along similar lines to his ethical views. A city-state has as a goal its own well-being. Democracy, Aristotle argued, would be a better way than oligarchy (government by a small elite) to achieve the goal.
Like many of Aristotle’s views, these ethical and political ideas have had some echoes and adherents in modern times. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Aristotle’s views were rooted in his own time: it is unlikely that anyone would now endorse Aristotle’s view that slavery is justifiable on practical grounds.
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