Aristotle

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Though much of Aristotle’s thought is historically interesting, it is also fascinating because it is a comprehensive picture of the world that differs, in some ways dramatically, from that of modern people. The works of Aristotle, however, can be daunting to the uninitated.

Unlike the carefully presented and highly literary works of Plato, the works of Aristotle tend to be terse and pithy, and to an extreme extent. In fact, the works of Aristotle which survive to the present day seem to be something like lecture notes. In addition to the prose style of Aristotle’s extant works, his texts are also made difficult by their frequently piecemeal nature. A comparison with Plato is again useful. Plato’s works are made to be read by an individual reader, and are generally self-contained. Aristotle’s works, as lecture notes, refer only briefly to important concepts that are not strictly relevant to the subject at hand. For example, much of his work is underlain by his conviction that particulars are ontologically prior to universals, but this idea is only explained at length in a couple of places. It’s worth observing that Aristotle, as a lecturer, would have been able to leave the topic at hand and explain any important ideas his listeners were unfamiliar with.

It is also important not to underestimate the difficulties that Aristotle’s language creates. Aristotle wrote in Ancient Greek, but it is not a Greek which translates easily to normal-sounding English. Aristotle makes liberal use of technical terms. For example, ‘form’ and ‘knowledge’ in English are each the best translation for three separate Greek words which Aristotle uses with different shades of meaning. He does not, however, use these terms consistently.

The style and organization of his works are not always negatives. Aristotle is made easier reading by the fact that his works frequently follow a predictable form. He often begins one of his investigations by stating the conclusions of earlier thinkers: frequently Plato, but other thinkers as well. [8] Then, he moves to a consideration of the problems, or aporiai, with a given idea, and he finally states his opinion— before moving to a discussion of the problems with his opinion! (It can be helpful for the reader to highlight, underline, or otherwise mark the proposition Aristotle is espousing.)

Neither Aristotle nor the other Greek philosophers made any distinction between scientific and philosophical investigations. Aristotle was particularly interested in observing nature and his biology was much admired by Darwin amongst others. Aristotle influenced subsequent studies by his view that organisms had a function, were striving towards some purposeful end, and that nature is not haphazard. If plant shoots are observed to bend towards the light they are ‘seeking the light’. The function of mankind is, he suggests, to reason, as this is what people are better at than any other member of the animal kingdom - ‘Man is a rational animal’. This approach is in contrast to that of today's biologist or scientist who try to explain things by reference to ‘mechanisms’.

Aristotle marks the watershed in Greek philosophy, born fifteen years after the execution of Socrates in 399 B.C.E, studying at the Academy in Athens under Plato until B.C.E 347. Although he had hoped to become Plato's successor, in fact Aristotle's approach was was out of favour with the mathematicians of the time, and Plato's nephew, Speussippus took over instead. After this Aristotle left Greece for Asia Minor where for the next five years he concentrated on developing his philosophy and biology. He then returned to Macedonia to be tutor to the future Alexander the Great, but there is little evidence of him influencing his pupil and indeed Aristotle seems to have been largely oblivious to the social and geo-political changes that were already making his approach to politics largely irrelevant.

Indeed, even whilst Aristotle was teaching about the polis in the Lyceum, Alexander was already planning an empire in which he would rule the whole of Greece and Persia, in the process producing a new society in which both Greeks and barbarians would become, as Plutarch later put it, ‘one flock on a common pasture’ feeding under one law. In fact, whilst Aristotle wrote on the case of the 'polis', for almost two millennia the area was to see no city states, but instead a succession of empires. The rule of Macedonia, of Rome, and of Charlemagne came and went, with Aritstotle not even so much as a footnote. Yet for much of this time, Aristotle was widely studied in the Islamic world, where he was hailed as 'the wise man' and his texts were carefully preserved. In the Middle Ages his ideas were 'rediscovered' by St Thomas Aquinas and, especially given the effective marriage of the Catholic Church with the state, became highly influential.

Aristotle was similarly concerned at the fractious nature of the Greek city states in his time, the fourth century B.C.E. The states were small, but that did not stop them continually splitting into factions that fought amongst themselves. A whole book of Aristotle’s political theory is devoted to this problem. And Aristotle shared Plato's aversion to tyranny, warning that under such government, all citizens would be constantly on view, and a secret police ‘like the female spies employed at Syracuse, or the eavesdroppers sent by the tyrant Hiero to all social gatherings’ would be employed to sow fear and distrust. For these are the essential and characteristic hallmarks of tyrants.

Aristotle sees the origin of the state differently from Plato, stating explicitly that ‘a State is not a sharing of a locality for the purpose of preventing mutual harm and promoting trade.’ True to his being a keen biologist first, a metaphysician second, he believed the state should be understood as an organism with a purpose, in this case, to promote happiness, or eudaimonia. Of course, this is only a particular type of happiness, quintessentially that of philosophical contemplation, that the Greeks - or at least the philosophers! - valued most. But in this basic assumption, Aristotle’s theory of human society is actually fundamentally different from Socrates and Plato’s.

For Aristotle, society is a means to ensure that the social nature of people - in forming families, in forming friendships and equally in trying to rule and control others, is channelled away from the negative attributes of human beings - greed and cruelty - towards the positive aspects - love of truth and knowledge - those of what he classed misleadingly as ‘the rational animal’. Misleading, because, after all, any animal is rational to the extent that it takes decisions to obtain food or to preserve its life. (The Chinese sages instead defined humans as ‘moral animals’.) Certainly, rationality pursued as a philosophical venture remained only available to an aristocratic leisured few.

In other ways, too, Aristotle’s Politics strike a discordant note. He defined the state as a collection of a certain size of citizens participating in the judicial and political processes of the City. But the term ‘citizens’ was not to include many inhabitants of the city. He did not include slaves, nor (unlike Plato) women, nor yet those who worked for a living. ‘For some men,’ Aristotle wrote, ‘belong by nature to others’ and so should properly be either slaves or chattels.

For Aristotle, liberty is fundamental for citizens - but it is a peculiar kind of liberty even for these privileged members of society. The state reserves the right to ensure efficient use of property, for its own advantage, and Aristotle agrees with Plato, that the production of children should be controlled to ensure the new citizens have ‘the best physique’. ( In Plato, it is put more generally so as to ‘improve on nature’. ) And, again like Plato, naturally, they will have to be educated in the manner determined by the state. ‘Public matters should be publicly managed; and we should not think that each of the citizens belongs to himself, but that they all belong to the State.’ Aristotle even produces a long list of ways in which the lives of citizens should be controlled. For the state is like the father in a well-regulated household: the children, (the citizens) ‘start with a natural affection and disposition to obey.’

Aristotle’s greatest achievement is generally supposed to have been his 'Laws of Thought' - part of his attempt to put everyday language on a logical footing. Like many contemporary philosophers he regarded logic as providing the key to philosophical progress. The traditional ‘laws of thought’ are that:

• whatever is, is (the law of identity);


• nothing can both be and not be (the law of non-contradiction); and


• everything must either be or not be (the law of excluded middle).

His Prior Analytics is the first attempt to create a system of formal deductive logic.

Plato as 'greybeard' and a younger Aristotle arguing, and gestiiculating (Mediterranean-style), about the nature of scientific inquiry

The Posterior Analytics attempts to use this to systematise scientific knowledge. In fact, about a quarter of Aristotle's writing seems to have been concerned with categorising nature, in particular animals. He describes the nature of space and time, and the different forms soul takes in different creatures. Some of his observations (such as that of how dolphins gave birth to their young) were careful and orignal, but equally certainly Aristotle has his fair share of foolish views, such as the influential but false doctrine that bodies fall to earth at speeds proportional to their mass, or the uninfluential but foolish claim that women had less teeth than men. It was Aristotle's arguments that meant that the Earth remained the immovable rock at the centre of the universe for another 1800 years.

Following Empedocles, Aristotle distinguishes four sub-lunar elements each with two basic properties (qualitates symbolae):

Earth, which is dry and cold


Water which is wet and cold


Air which is wet and hot


Fire which is dry and hot

He claims that all homogeneous materials are compounds of these four elements. All elements can be converted into each other, but most preferably the conversion is to an element that shares one of the four basic properties (dry, wet, cold, hot) with the element to be converted. To the four earthly element Aristotle added a fifth heavenly element, the Aether.

Aristotle's views on morality are set out in the Nicomachean and the Eudaemian Ethics. The Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most influential books of moral philosophy, including accounts of what the Greeks considered to be the great virtues, and Aristotle’s great souled man, who speaks with a deep voice and level utterance, and who is not unduly modest either, as well as reminding us wisely that “without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods”. The main idea in Aristotle's ethics is that the proper end of mankind is the pursuit of eudaimonia which is Greek for a very particular kind of ‘happiness’. Eudaimonia has three aspects: as well as mere pleasure, there is political honour, and the rewards of contemplation. Quintessentially, of course, as philosophy.

Other doctrines often attributed to Aristotle, notably the merit of fulfilling your ‘function’, of cultivating the ‘virtues’, (hence, 'virtue ethics') and of the ‘golden mean’ between two undesirable extremes are, of course, all much older. Indeed Plato puts the ideas forward much more cogently.

Nonetheless, one important difference between Aristotle and Plato is there in the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle starts with a survey of popular opinions on the subject of 'right and wrong', to find out how the terms are used, in the manner of a social anthropologist. Plato makes very clear his contempt for such an approach. Thomas Hobbes said that it was this method that had led Aristotle astray, as by seeking to ground ethics in the 'appetites of men', he had chosen a measure by which (for Hobbes) correctly there is no law and no distinction between right and wrong. In fact, Hobbes considered Aristotle a great fool, protesting repeatedly the 'folly' of 'the Ancients.

The conventional view of Aristotle is that he represented a different way to seeking knowledge to Plato, epitomised by the famous picture 'The School of Athens' in which Plato is depicted with a hand pointing upwards as if to the 'heavenly forms', while Aristotle gestures downwards, supposedly reflecting his search for knowledge through earthly 'empirical facts'. Although both valued and emphasised reason and its use the distinction is made that Plato insisted that the most important truths, the objects of knowledge, must be attained through reason alone. For Aristotle knowing was to be achieved through observing.

This page is drawn from 'Philosophical Tales' by Martin Cohen, Blackwell 2008, supplemented by extracts from the Citizendium article of the same name, which has incorporated perhaps contrary and unreliable viewpoints!