Chapter 11: Aristotle pages104-119

Aristotle
...a particular organizer who wanted to clarify our concepts…

Philospher and Scientist
Aristotle 384-322 b.c.
He was most interested in nature study.
He was Europe’s first great biologist.
While Plato used his reason, Aristotle used his senses as well.
Aristotle created the terminology that scientists use today.

No Innate Ideas
Innate: that is, something people are born with rather than something people have learned through experience.
Aristotle disagreed with Plato that the “idea” chicken came before the chicken.
Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses.
Aristotle held that all our thoughts and ideas have come into our consciousness through what we have heard and seen.
We have an innate faculty of organizing all sensory impressions into categories and classes.

The Form of a Thing is its Specific Characteristics:
Aristotle decided that reality consisted of various separate things that make up a unity of form and substance.

The “substance” is what things are made of, while the “form” is each thing’s specific characteristics.

The Final Cause:
žAristotle held that there were different types of cause
in nature.
žIt rains so that plants can grow; oranges and grapes grow so that people can eat them.

Logic:
Hermes is a live creative, more a mammal, more specifically a dog, more specifically a Labrador, more specifically a male Labrador.

He founded the science of logic.

Nature's Scale:
There is a decisive difference between a living and a nonliving thing, for example a rose and a stone, just as there is a decisive difference between a plant and an animal.

Ethics:
How should we live?
What does it require to live a good life?
His answer- Man can only achieve happiness by using all his abilities and capabilities.
3 Forms of happiness:
1. life of pleasure and enjoyment
2. life as a free and responsible citizen
3. life as a thinker and philosopher

“GOLDEN MEAN” is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency (lack).

For example:
Courage a virtue, if taken to excess would manifest as recklessness and if deficient as cowardice.

žIt is dangerous to eat too little, but also dangerous to
eat too much.
žOnly by exercising balance and temperance will I achieve
a happy or “harmonious” life

Politics:
Monarchy or kingship- which means there is only one head of state.

Oligarchy [ol-i-gahr-kee]- when the government is run by a few people.

Aristocracy [ar-uh-stok-ruh-see]-which there is a larger or smaller group of rulers.

Polity(democracy)

Views on Woman:
Aristotle was more inclined to believe that woman were incomplete in some way.
A woman was an “unfinished man”
He believed that all the child inherits only male characteristics lay complete in the male sperm.

Questions:
4. What discipline did Aristotle found as a science?
5. What was the "idea" or "form" of, for example, horse, to Aristotle?
6. What did Aristotle point out about all things that exist in consciousness?
7. What are "innate ideas?" What did Aristotle hold regarding them?
8. What is Aristotle's answer to the question, "What does it require to live a good life?"

9.What is the "Golden Mean?"
10 What did Aristotle claim about women?
11. Why was Aristotle's view of the sexes "doubly harmful?"