Aristotle

Introduction

Aristotle is the philosopher referred to in the medieval Latin tradition simply as the Philosopher — the figure whose body of work was so comprehensive, so rigorous, and so influential that for centuries to cite the Philosopher was to cite a settled question. He founded Western formal logic, effectively invented the empirical study of biology, gave virtue ethics its canonical form in the Nicomachean Ethics, and organized the philosophical curriculum of the medieval university through his collected works.

He also broke with his teacher Plato on the deepest point: the Forms are not transcendent. They are immanent in the particular things that have them. This single methodological correction — putting reality back into the world we can observe — made Aristotelianism the empirical, naturalistic counter-pole to Platonism, and made Aristotle the founding philosopher of the natural sciences in their long Western form.

Life

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small Greek city in northern Greece (Chalcidice). His father was Nicomachus, court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas III — a connection that would prove consequential. At seventeen Aristotle was sent to Athens and entered Plato's Academy, where he remained for nearly twenty years, until Plato's death in 348/347 BCE.

After Plato's death (and the appointment of Plato's nephew Speusippus to head the Academy), Aristotle left Athens. He spent time in Assos, on the coast of Asia Minor, married Pythias (the niece of his patron Hermias), and conducted biological investigations. In 343/342 BCE he was summoned to the Macedonian court to tutor a thirteen-year-old prince — Alexander, soon to be the Great. He held this post for several years.

When Alexander succeeded to the throne and began his eastern campaigns, Aristotle returned to Athens (335 BCE) and founded his own school, the Lyceum, in a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceus. His students were called peripatetics, supposedly from the school's covered walkway. He taught and wrote there for twelve years. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens turned dangerous; Aristotle, with Macedonian connections, fled to Chalcis, reportedly saying he would not let Athens sin twice against philosophy (the first sin being Socrates's execution). He died there in 322 BCE.

The problem he worked on

Aristotle's organizing question was different from Plato's. Plato asked what truly is; Aristotle asked what anything is, and how to know it. The shift is methodological. For Aristotle, the right starting point of inquiry is the actual phenomena — the observable behavior of plants, animals, motion, human action, political communities — and the right outcome of inquiry is an explanation of why the phenomena are what they are.

This is the empirical temperament that runs through everything Aristotle did. The biological works contain hundreds of pages of careful observations of species, many still cited by zoologists. The Politics surveys 158 actual constitutions (now lost except for fragments and the Constitution of the Athenians). The Nicomachean Ethics begins not with a metaphysical premise but with the observation that all human action aims at some good and proceeds by analyzing the structure that observation reveals.

Contributions

The four causes

Aristotle's account of explanation: every change or thing has four kinds of cause — material (what it is made of), formal (what it is), efficient (what brought it about), and final (what it is for). To fully understand something is to grasp all four. A bronze statue has bronze as its material cause, the shape of the figure as its formal cause, the sculptor's craft as its efficient cause, and (say) civic commemoration as its final cause. The framework feels strange to modern readers because efficient causation alone is the focus of modern physical explanation; restoring the other three is much of what makes Aristotelian thinking distinctive.

Hylomorphism

Every substance is a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Form is not a separate Platonic entity in another realm; it is the structuring principle in the thing. The form of a horse is in actual horses, not in a transcendent Horse. This is the great Aristotelian fix to Plato, and it has profound consequences: it makes the natural world fully real, makes empirical inquiry intrinsically valuable, and allows for a metaphysics that does not require a transcendent realm.

Teleology in nature

Everything in nature has a telos — an end toward which it tends. The acorn tends toward being an oak. The eye is for seeing. The human being is for the activity of the rational soul. This teleological view of nature was attacked by the Scientific Revolution (Galileo, Bacon, Descartes) as projecting purpose onto a mechanical universe, and modern physics has largely dispensed with it. But the teleological frame survives where it remains useful: in biology (organs do have functions), in ethics (the question what is this for is still the right one), and in some recent metaphysics that takes seriously the Aristotelian categories.

Virtue ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics is the founding text of Western virtue ethics. The argument: all human action aims at some good; the highest good is eudaimonia (flourishing); eudaimonia consists in activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life, with sufficient external goods. Each virtue is a mean between two extremes, found through phronesis (practical wisdom). Virtue is acquired through habituation; you become courageous by performing courageous acts under guidance until courage becomes second nature.

The analytic precision of the Ethics is striking. Aristotle distinguishes voluntary from involuntary action, deliberation from wish, intellectual from moral virtue, philosophical from practical wisdom. Each distinction does real work. The book is the most thorough single treatment of how to live well in the Western canon.

Formal logic

The Organon — the collected logical works — founded formal logic. The syllogistic system Aristotle developed (all S are M; all M are P; therefore all S are P) was the only formal logic anyone used until the late 19th century. Kant, writing in 1781, could plausibly claim that logic had not advanced one step since Aristotle. (The 19th and 20th centuries dramatically expanded logic, but the Aristotelian system remains valid within its domain.)

The empirical sciences

Aristotle's biological works (Historia Animalium, De Partibus Animalium, De Generatione Animalium) constitute the founding of empirical biology. He carefully observed the anatomy and behavior of hundreds of species, including marine invertebrates that no European naturalist would re-observe for nearly two thousand years. His classification of animals by kind and his attention to the embryological development of organisms anticipated central themes of modern biology.

Key works

The Aristotelian corpus is vast and somewhat haphazardly organized; what survives is mostly lecture notes, not polished works for publication.

Logic (the Organon): Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations.

Natural philosophy: Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology.

Biology: Historia Animalium, De Partibus Animalium, De Generatione Animalium.

Psychology: De Anima (On the Soul).

Metaphysics: Metaphysics (so called because in the traditional ordering it came after the Physics).

Ethics and politics: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Politics.

Aesthetics and rhetoric: Rhetoric, Poetics (the most influential single book on literary theory).

The lost works are also substantial — Aristotle wrote dialogues for publication (Cicero compared his style favorably to Plato's), most of which are lost; the surviving corpus is essentially his internal teaching material.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Plato (his teacher for two decades; the relationship is the most important in the history of philosophy); the Pre-Socratics (whose various positions Aristotle catalogs and criticizes throughout); his father (the physician, whose empirical orientation likely shaped Aristotle's biology); the medical tradition; the empirical practice of dissection.

Influenced: Theophrastus and the Peripatetics; Hellenistic medicine and natural philosophy; the great commentators of late antiquity (Alexander of Aphrodisias especially); the Islamic philosophical tradition (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes), which transmitted Aristotle back to the Latin West; medieval Scholasticism, especially Aquinas; the modern revival of virtue ethics (Anscombe, Foot, MacIntyre, Nussbaum); contemporary philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, where Aristotelian categories have been quietly rehabilitated.

For much of medieval European intellectual history, philosophy meant Christianized Aristotelianism. The Scientific Revolution involved overthrowing the specifics of Aristotelian physics; it did not involve, and could not have involved, overthrowing the broader Aristotelian project of explaining phenomena in terms of their causes.

Reception

Aristotle's contemporary reputation was significant but eclipsed in the immediate post-Hellenistic period by the Stoics and Epicureans. His texts were preserved through the work of editors in the first century BCE (the corpus aristotelicum as we have it owes much to Andronicus of Rhodes's edition).

In late antiquity, the Greek commentary tradition (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, Simplicius) produced sophisticated readings. In the Islamic world from the 9th century onward, Aristotle was the philosophical authority; the great Islamic philosophers wrote massive commentary projects. Through Arabic translations and commentaries, Aristotle re-entered the Latin West in the 12th and 13th centuries and transformed European intellectual life. The medieval university curriculum was substantially Aristotelian.

The Renaissance and Scientific Revolution involved a sustained critique of Aristotelian physics and a partial displacement of Aristotle as the central authority. Galileo's mockery of Aristotelians who would not look through telescopes is canonical. But the methodological commitments — empirical observation, explanation in terms of causes, the importance of careful classification — survived the displacement of the specific physical doctrines.

The 20th century saw substantial revival. Heidegger lectured on Aristotle throughout his career and called him the most influential figure on his own thought. The virtue ethics revival from Anscombe's 1958 essay onward returned the Nicomachean Ethics to the philosophical conversation. Contemporary analytic metaphysics has rehabilitated Aristotelian essentialism (Kripke, Fine, Lowe). Aristotle is, as much as he ever was, a living philosopher.

Continuing engagement

Contemporary Aristotle scholarship spans an unusually wide range. The Princeton revised Oxford translation (Barnes, 1984) remains the standard English edition; the Clarendon Aristotle series provides extensive commentary on individual works. Major recent monographs include Sarah Broadie's Ethics with Aristotle (1991), Christopher Shields's Aristotle (2007), and the multi-volume work of Christof Rapp and others on the Rhetoric. Distinct subfields include Aristotelian biology (James Lennox, Allan Gotthelf), the philosophy of mind of De Anima (Christopher Shields, Victor Caston), Aristotelian metaphysics in the analytic tradition (Kit Fine, E.J. Lowe), and neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics (the Anscombe-Foot-MacIntyre-Hursthouse line). The Symposium Aristotelicum, an international conference held every three years since 1957, continues as the leading institutional venue for Aristotelian scholarship.

Further reading

• Plato — the teacher he absorbed and corrected
• Aristotelianism — the tradition he founded
• Nicomachean Ethics — the central text
• Virtue — the concept his ethics organized around
• Eudaimonia — the end his ethics aimed at
• Aquinas — the Christian Aristotelian synthesis

The philosopher who organized Western intellectual life for two millennia. Still the canonical figure on virtue, causation, and biology's explanatory categories.