Aristotle

Chapter 4

Aristotles Life
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in the small town in Stagira on the northeast coast of Thrace His father was a physician to the king of Macedonia. It could be that Aristotles great interest in biology and science. When he was 17 years old, Aristotle went to Athens to enrol in Platos Academy, where he spent 20 years as a pupil Had the reputation of being the reader and the mind of the school.

We can say, therefore, that Aristotle oriented his thought to the dynamic realm of becoming, whereas Platos thought was fixed more upon the static realm of timeless Being. It was in 348/47 BCE that Aristotle left the academy and accepted the invitation of Hermias to come to Assos, near Troy. Hermias had formerly been student at the Acedemy and was now the ruler of Assos. His book the Nicomachean Ethics was named after to his his son, Nicomachus.

Upon his return to Athens in 335/34 BCE, Aristotle began the most productive period of his life. Under the protection of the Macedonian statesman, Antipater, Aristotle founded his own school. His school was known as the Lyceum, named after the groves where Socrates was known to have gone to think and which were the sacred precincts of Apollo Lyceus.

Like Socrates before him, Aristotle was charged with impiety but as he reported to have said, lest the Athenians should sin twice against philosophy, he left Lyceum and fled to Chalcis, where he died in 322 BCE of a digestive disease of long standing.

Logic
Aristotle invented formal logic. For him there was a close connection between logic and science, inasmuch as he considered logic to be the instrument with which to formulate language properly when analyzing what a science involves.

The Categories and the Starting Point of Reasoning

Whenever we think of some distinct thing, we think of a subject and its predicates that is, of some substance and its accidents. We can consider substance itself as a category, since we say, for example, he is a human, in which case human (a substance) is a . There are always predicates (categories) related to subjects (substances).

Language is the instrument for formulating scientific thought. Logic, then, is the analysis of language, the process of reasoning, and the way language and reasoning are related to reality.

The Syllogism

Aristotle develops a system of logic, based on syllogism, which he defines as discourse in which certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so. The classic example of a syllogism is this:

Major premise: All humans are mortal. Minor premise: Socrates is a human. Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The first two statements are premises, which serve as evidence for the third statement, which is the conclusion Aristotle distinguished between three kinds of reasoning, each of which might use the instrument of the syllogism, but with different results. These are:

1. 2.

3.

Dialectic reasoning, which is reasoning from opinions that are generally accepted; Eristic, or contentious reasoning, which begins with opinions that seem to be generally accepted but are really not; and demonstrative reasoning, where the premises from which reasoning starts are true and primary.

Metaphysics
Aristotle develops what he called the science of first philosophy. The term metaphysics has a somewhat cloudy origin, but in this context it seems at least in part to signify the position of this work among Aristotles other writings, namely, that it is beyond, or comes or comes after, his work on physics.

Throughout Metaphysics he deals with the type of knowledge that he thought could be most rightly called wisdom. This work begins with the statement All men by nature desire to know.

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