Transcript aristotle - The Ecclesbourne School Online

ARISTOTLE
• Aristotle's father was Nicomachus, a
doctor who lived near Macedon, in the
north of Greece. So unlike Socrates and
Plato, Aristotle was not originally from
Athens. He was not from a rich family like
Plato, though his father was not poor
either.
When Aristotle was a young man, about
350 BC, he went to study at Plato's
Academy.
Plato was already pretty old then. Aristotle
did very well at the Academy. But he never
got to be among its leaders, and when
Plato died, Aristotle was not chosen to
lead the Academy after him. Soon
afterwards, Aristotle left Athens and went
to Macedon to be the tutor of the young
prince Alexander, who grew up to be
Alexander the Great.
As far as we can tell, Alexander was not at
all interested in learning anything from
Aristotle, but they did become friends.
When Alexander grew up and became king,
Aristotle went back to Athens and opened
his own school there, the Lyceum, in
competition with Plato's Academy. Both
schools were successful for hundreds of
years
• Aristotle was more interested in science than
Socrates or Plato, maybe because his father
was a doctor. He wanted to use Socrates' logical
methods to figure out how the real world worked;
therefore Aristotle is really the father of today's
scientific method.
• Aristotle was especially interested in biology, in
classifying plants and animals in a way that
would make sense. This is part of the Greek
impulse to make order out of chaos: to take the
chaotic natural world and impose a man-made
order on it.
• When Alexander was travelling all over
Western Asia, he had his messengers
bring strange plants back to Aristotle for
his studies. Aristotle also made efforts to
create order in peoples' governments.
• He created a classification system of
monarchies, oligarchies, tyrannies,
democracies and republics which we still
use today.
• When Alexander died in 323 BC, though,
there were revolts against Macedonian
rule in Athens. People accused Aristotle of
being secretly on the side of the
Macedonians.
• He left town quickly, and spent the last
years of his life back in the north again
where he had been born.
• Ancient Greek philosophy is dominated by three
very famous men: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
• All three of these lived in Athens for most of
their lives, and they knew each other. Socrates
came first, and Plato was his student, around
400 BC. Socrates was killed in 399 BC, and
Plato began his work by writing down what
Socrates had taught, and then continued by
writing down his own ideas and opening a
school. Aristotle, who was younger, came to
study at Plato's school, and ended up starting
his own school as well.
• In the years after Plato and Aristotle died,
in the 200's BC, three famous kinds of
philosophy started up in the schools that
Plato and Aristotle had started. These are
the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the
Epicureans.
• Each of these continued to be important
ways of thinking about the world all the
way through the Roman Empire, until
people converted to Christianity in the
300's AD, and even after that.
• The Stoics were a group of philosophers who
first began teaching their ideas in the Hellenistic
period. Stoicism was founded by a man named
Zeno, who lived from 335-263 BC. He was
friendly with the successors of Alexander who
ruled Greece.
• Zeno lived in Athens, which was a great centre
of learning. He used to lecture not in a
classroom but outside on the porch of a public
building. The word for porch in Greek is STOA,
and so people called his students Stoics,
"people who hang out on the porch."
• Zeno thought people should try to reach inner
peacefulness. The best way to be peaceful was
to be moderate in everything. So people should
not eat too much, even of good food, and they
should not party too much.
• But they should not work all the time either, or
diet all the time. Men (Zeno didn't mention
women much, but there were women who were
Stoics) should give to charity and help out in the
government, but they should not go to the
extreme of rebellion
• People should try not to want anything too
much, but be happy with what they had.
This would lead to a happy life.
Stoicism was very popular among the
early Romans, who generally liked
moderate behavior anyway. One famous
Roman Stoic was Seneca
• We don’t know as much as we might like
to about the activities of Plato’s Academy
after the death of Aristotle. But between
about 300 and 100 B.C. — almost up to
the birth of Jesus — the Academy became
known as the center of the Skeptics.
• The Skeptics were a group of philosophers
whose main idea was that we can't really know
anything for certain about the world around us,
or about ourselves. Therefore, we can't really
ever know what is right or wrong, either.
• Some of these ideas came from Socrates, who
also thought that the wisest man is the one who
realizes that he doesn’t know anything, but
Skepticism really began with Pyrrhon (about
365-270 B.C.) and was continued by Pyrrhon's
student Timon (about 320-230 B.C.).
• You might say, if you can't really know
anything, why bother studying philosophy
at all? But the Skeptics said the real point
was not to worry about things they couldn't
know or didn't have enough information to
decide.
• Instead, people should relax and let go. If
you couldn't know, then there wasn't any
point in worrying about it. You should leave
it in the hands of the gods.
• Some people think that this Skeptic
attitude might have been influenced by
Indian philosophy. This is certainly
possible, because Alexander the Great
went to India around this time, and we
know that Alexander and his followers
spoke to many Indian philosophers there.
• According to some Greek historians,
Pyrrhon actually travelled to India with
Alexander
• Pyrrhon himself did not write down any of
his ideas, so we don't know as much about
the Skeptics as we would like to. We do
know that most people forgot about
Skepticism after about 100 years, so it
wasn't as successful a philosophy as
Stoicism or Epicureanism
• Another philosophical group which
developed in the Hellenistic period, around
the same time as the Skeptics, was the
Epicureans. Epicureans were named after
their founder, Epicurus, who lived around
300 B.C. Epicureans believed that the
main reason for studying philosophy was
practical: to make a happy life for yourself.
They said that you would be happy if you
had more pleasure in your life and less
sadness. But sadness is caused by not
getting what you want.
• The Epicureans said that the best way to be
happy and not sad was to not want anything. It's
wanting things that leads to pain. If you're
always wanting more things, then you can't
enjoy the things you do have, because you're
always suffering the sadness of not having
things. (You might want to compare this to the
Chinese philosophy of Taoism). The Epicureans
advised people not to make close friends or fall
in love, because it could lead to sadness if your
friend went away or died. The less you want, the
happier you will be. These ideas, like the ideas
of the Skeptics, may have been learned partly
from Indian philosophers
• Epicureanism, like Stoicism, lasted
throughout the Roman Empire. Lucretius
was a famous Roman Epicurean in the
time of Julius Caesar who wrote a long
book on the subject, On the Nature of
Things (De Rerum Naturae).
• Epicureans are still found as late as the
200’s AD. The Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius, who wrote the Mediations, was
an Epicurean
• Epicureans had an important influence on
Christianity. The Christian idea that holy people
should separate themselves from the world, not
think about their bodies or about the things they
own or on their friends and family and focus just
on Heaven owes something to Epicureanism.
• But Christians hated Epicureans for denying the
existence of heaven and hell, and the
immortality of the soul, and for their reliance on
pleasure as a good thing. So Epicureanism was
done in partly by the rise of Christianity.
• The Epicureans also taught people that
when they died, their soul would die with
their body, because both were made of
atoms that would be broken up and made
into other things when you died.
• They said that therefore people should not
be afraid of dying or worry about what
would happen to them after they died.
• The Epicureans also said not to be afraid
of the gods, because the gods did not
interfere with people's lives.
• When things happened, it was just
because of natural, scientific causes, and
nothing to do with the gods.
Aristotle on
the Soul
• Matter and Form
1. Aristotle uses his familiar matter/form distinction to
answer the question “What is soul?” At the beginning of
De Anima II.1, he says that there are three sorts of
substance:
– Matter (potentiality)
– Form (actuality)
– The compound of matter and form
2.Aristotle is interested in compounds that are alive. These
- plants and animals - are the things that have souls.
Their souls are what make them living things.
3.Since form is what makes matter a “this,” the soul is the
form of a living thing. (Not its shape, but its actuality,
that in virtue of which it is the kind of living thing that it
is.)
Grades of
Actuality and
Potentiality
1. Aristotle distinguishes between two
levels of actuality (entelecheia). At
412a11 he gives knowing and attending
as examples of these two kinds of
actuality. (It has become traditional to call
these first and second actuality,
respectively.) At 412a22-26 he
elaborates this example and adds this
one: being asleep vs. being awake. But
he does not fully clarify this important
distinction until II.5 (417a22-30), to which
we now turn.
2. At 417a20, Aristotle says that there are
different types of both potentiality and
actuality. His example concerns different
ways in which someone might be
described as a knower. One might be
called a knower in the sense that he or
she:
a) is a human being.
b) has grammatical knowledge.
c) is attending to something.
• A knower in sense (a) is someone with a mere
potential to know something, but no actual
knowledge. (Not everything has this potential, of
course. E.g., a rock or an earthworm has no
such potential.) A knower in sense (b) has some
actual knowledge (for example, she may know
that it is ungrammatical to say “with John and I”),
even though she is not actually thinking about it
right now. A knower in sense (c) is actually
exercising her knowledge (for example, she
thinks “that’s ungrammatical” when she hears
someone say “with John and I”).
3. Note that (b) involves both actuality and
potentiality. The knower in sense (b)
actually knows something, but that actual
knowledge is itself just a potentiality to
think certain thoughts or perform certain
actions. So we can describe our three
knowers this way:
A) First potentiality
B) Second potentiality = first actuality
C) Second actuality
4. Here is another example (not Aristotle’s)
that might help clarify the distinction.
a) First potentiality: a child who does not speak
French.
b) Second potentiality (first actuality): a (silent)
adult who speaks French.
C) Second actuality: an adult speaking (or
actively understanding) French
A child (unlike a rock or an earthworm) can
(learn to) speak French.
A Frenchman (unlike a French infant) can
actually speak French, even though he is
silent at the moment.
Someone who is actually speaking French
is, of course, the paradigm case of a
French speaker.
5. Aristotle uses the notion of first actuality in
his definition of the soul (412a27):
The soul is the first actuality of a natural
body that is potentially alive
6. Remember that first actuality is a kind of
potentiality -a capacity to engage in the
activity which is the corresponding
second actuality.
So soul is a capacity - but a capacity to do
what?
7.A living thing’s soul is its capacity to
engage in the activities that are
characteristic of living things of its natural
kind. What are those activities? Some
are listed in DA II.1; others in DA II.2:
–
–
–
–
–
Self-nourishment
Growth
Decay
Movement and rest (in respect of place)
Perception
- Intellect
8. So anything that nourishes itself, that
grows, decays, moves about (on its own,
not just when moved by something else),
perceives, or thinks is alive. And the
capacities of a thing in virtue of which it
does these things constitute its soul. The
soul is what is causally responsible for
the animate behavior (the life activities) of
a living thing.
Degrees of
soul
1.There is a nested hierarchy of soul
functions or activities (413a23).
a) Growth, nutrition, (reproduction)
b) Locomotion, perception
C) Intellect (= thought
2. This gives us three corresponding
degrees of soul:
a) Nutritive soul (plants)
b) Sensitive soul (all animals)
c) Rational soul (human beings
3.These are nested in the sense that
anything that has a higher degree of soul
also has all of the lower degrees. All
living things grow, nourish themselves,
and reproduce.
Animals not only do that, but move and
perceive. Humans do all of the above
and reason, as well. (There are further
subdivisions within the various levels,
which we will ignore.)
Soul and
Body
1.
A key question for the ancient Greeks (as it still is for
many people today) is whether the soul can exist
independently of the body. (Anyone who believes in
personal immortality is committed to the independent
existence of the soul.) Plato (as we know from the
Phaedo) certainly thought that the soul could exist
separately. Here is what Aristotle has to say on this
topic:
. . . the soul does not exist without a body and yet is not
itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something
which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a
body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind
(414a20ff).
So on Aristotle’s account, although the soul is not a
material object, it is not separable from the body.
(When it comes to the intellect, however, Aristotle
waffles. See DA III.4)
2.Aristotle’s picture is not Cartesian:
a)There is no inner/outer contrast. The soul is
not an inner spectator, in direct contact only
with its own perceptions and other psychic
states, having to infer the existence of a
body and an “external” world.
There is thus no notion of the privacy of
experience, the incorrigibility of the
mental, etc., in Aristotle’s picture.
b) The soul is not an independently existing
substance. It is linked to the body more
directly: it is the form of the body, not a
separate substance inside another
substance (a body) of a different kind. It is a
capacity, not the thing that has the capacity.
It is thus not a separable soul. (It is, at
most, pure thought, devoid of
c) Soul has little to do with personal identity and
individuality. There is no reason to think that one
(human) soul is in any important respect different
from any other (human) soul. The form of one
human being is the same as the form of any other.
There is, in this sense, only soul, and not souls.
You and I have different souls because we are
different people. But we are different human
beings because we are different compounds of
form and matter. That is, different bodies both
animated by the same set of capacities, by the
same (kind of) soul.