Aristotle's Philosophy and Science

• Aristotle lived from 384-322 B.C.
• He was a student of Plato.
• Aristotle retained the changeless eternal forms, but rejected their transcendency

Aristotle's Ideas

• Ideas are not detached from the perceived world
• Experience is the basis of knowledge, and the world humans experience is not untrustworthy

Aristotle's Science

• Science includes Logic
• Logic elaborates the method of inquiry used in all other sciences
• Theoretical Sciences are concerned with pure, abstract knowledge such as mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, and first philosophy
• Practical Sciences pursue knowledge to conduct rather than as an end, like ethics and politics
• Productive sciences subordinate knowledge to the creation of beauty as in poetics
• Science is considered the highest knowledge; however, metaphysical knowledge, an inquiry of a final cause of all things, is more than scientific knowledge

Arguments Against the Idea of Idea

• Ideas are mere abstractions that cannot account for concrete things' existence
• Forms are static and eternal, unable to explain concrete things' motion and change
• Ideas are posterior rather than prior to particular things, and thus cannot be used to explain them
• Ideas are copies of things, not their causes
• Ideas are unnecessary reduplications of things and not explanations
• Saying things are the "copies of" or “participate in" ideas does not explain anything
• Saying an individual man participates in the ideal man adds nothing to the understanding of the individual
• The relation between ideas and corresponding things leads to an infinite regress (Third Man Argument)
• The Theory of ideas separates a thing's essence or form from the thing itself, at odds with the unity of the particular observed by the mind
• An idea or form cannot be a self-existent essence apart from matter
• Particular objects or individual beings are real substances
• Metaphysical position is pluralism rather than monism

Additional Notes

• Universal and the particular are fused into the complete unity of the individual
• Individual objects are subject to change
• There has to be something that underlies change
• No form can change into another form
• To explain change or growth, assume a substratum (matter) that persists and changes

Potentiality and Actuality

• Matter by itself has no form, but has the potential to become something
• Potentiality comes from the generating principle of form
• Example: clay
• A potter shapes with skill, forming indeterminate clay into actual bricks
• Greenness is an idea that can be actualized in a green leaf or green things
• Form is the principle of actualization
• Actuality is prior to potentiality, even in time

Prime Mover

• Prime mover moves everything but remains unmoved
• Pure potentiality is nothing definite
• Pure potentiality under the influence of Prime Mover progressively gets actualized from lower to higher order, up to the highest order
• God is an actual being with no potentiality, all perfect and lacking nothing

Four Principles

• The material cause
• The formal cause
• The efficient cause
• The final cause