ARISTOTLEPRESENTED BY:

FAROUQ UMAR IDRIS

ARISTOTLENAME: Aristotle

OCCUPATION: philosopher

BIRTH DATE: c. 384 BCE

DEATH DATE: c. 322 BCE

EDUCATION: Plato's Academy, Lyceum

PLACE OF BIRTH: Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece

PLACE OF DEATH: Chalcis, Euboea, Greece

He was a Greek philosopher and polymath. Also a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.

His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.

Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing ethics, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.

BRIEF HISTORY

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.

Aristotle is an empiricist because he thinks that all knowledge comes to human beings from and through sensation. Our minds start out as blank slates and from sensation we get our ideas or the so-called "contents" of our minds.

Aristotle as an empiricist

Metaphysics (questions related to existence)

Epistemology (questions related to knowledge)

Logic (theory of correct reasoning) Values (Ethics)

Branches of philosophy

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of "first principles" and "being" In other words, Metaphysics is the study of the most general aspects of reality, such as substance, identity, the nature of the mind, and free will. It is a study of nature and the nature of the world in which man lives.

Aristotle and Metaphysics

Aristotle’s Metaphysics has as its central theme on an inquiry into how substance may be defined as a category of being. According to Aristotle, the being of any individual thing is primarily defined by what it is, i.e. by its substance. Substance is both essence (form) and substratum (matter), and may combine form and matter.

Cont’d

kinds of causes of things: the formal cause (the form of the thing) the material cause (what it is made of) the efficient cause (what made it) and the final cause (its purpose or end).

Cont’d

Aristotle divided his Metaphysics into three parts Ontology: The study of being and existence; includes

the definition and classification of entities, physical or mental, the nature of their properties, and the nature of change.

Theology: The study of a God or gods; involves many topics, including among others the nature of religion and the world, existence of the divine, questions about Creation, and the numerous religious or spiritual issues that concern humankind in general.

Universal science: The study of first principles, such as the law of noncontradiction (logic), which Aristotle believed were the foundation of all other inquiries.

Cont’d

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.

Aristotle considered ethics to be a practical rather than theoretical study, i.e., one aimed at becoming good and doing good rather than knowing for its own sake.

Aristotle and Ethics

Aristotle taught that virtue has to do with the proper function of a thing. An eye is only a good eye in so much as it can see, because the proper function of an eye is sight. Aristotle reasoned that humans must have a function specific to humans, and that this function must be an activity of the soul in accordance with reason.

Cont’d

The term "logic" came from the Greek word logos, which is sometimes translated as "sentence", "discourse", "reason", "rule", and "ratio“.

logic as the study of the principles of correct reasoning.

actually quite a controversial matter.

Logic

Aristotle was the first to systematically study and catalogue the rules of correct logical reasoning

His logic is important because it dominated all western thought, including scientific thought, until the 19th century CE; it also had enormous influence on the development of Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophy. It is still influential today.

Although other types of logical systems exist, Aristotelian logic is still a powerful tool used to teach reasoning skills in numerous academic disciplines.

Logic and Aristotle

In his logic, Aristotle explicitly established three laws of logical thought.

Law # 1: law of identity: “each thing is inseparable from itself and its being one just meant this” A thing is just itself and not something else: e.g. a soccer ball is a soccer ball and not a kitchen stove.

* Sometimes this is expressed as A = A. Note: the fact that we can use a book for a doorstop does

not mean it is not a book. Its use does not contradict the law of identity. What a thing is and how it is used are two different issues.

Cont’d

Law # 2: the law of contradiction: “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect” . E.g. my cup cannot be blue and not-blue at the same time

• A cannot be A and not-A at the same time in the same way/respect.

Note: things may have and not have the same attributes in different ways: e.g. man is the most intelligent creature compared to animals but he is not intelligent compared to God. So man is both intelligent (compared to animals) and not intelligent (compared to God). There is no contradiction because ‘intelligent’ is being used in different ways.

Cont’d

Law # 3: the law of the excluded middle or excluded third : “there cannot be an intermediate between two contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate [statement]” .

• A statement about a topic must either be true or false. It cannot be both, i.e. there is no middle between them. It cannot be neither true nor false.

• Note: It is either true that Socrates is mortal or it is not true that he is not mortal. He is not both. Nor can he be neither mortal nor immortal.

• Another example: It is either true that there is a rubber duck in my bath tub or it is not true. Nor can we say neither of these choices is true.

Cont’d

Epistemology is derived from the two Greek words “episteme “knowledge and “logos” science, and means the science of knowledge. As employed in philosophy the word means the science of the certitude of human knowledge.

Epistemology

Aristotle defines soul as the Form of a natural body that has the potential to possess life. This body then must be furnished with organs: lungs, stomach etc. Life then is the process of growth and nutrition.

Sensation requires an external stimulus, to move the potentiality to an actuality. In this case, the perceptive organ, i.e. the eye, is potentially what the object is actually. When having a sensation, the eye, which is only logically distinct from the “seeing” of the eye, is one in quality with the object of sight. So when looking at a green wall, the eye becomes qualitatively green.

Aristotle and Epistemology