About Aristotle

by Gustave Doré

Aristotle, a well-known and frequently mentioned philosopher after Plato, grew up in Thrace and later moved to Athens to enroll in Plato’s Academy. Aristotle started his own school called Lytheum, where he strolled while talking about philosophy with his students. This act was called peripatetic. This passage will begin with discussing the essential difference between Aristotle and Plato, and then introduce Aristotle’s thoughts about logic.

Two core concepts in Plato’s philosophy are “matter” and “form”. While “matter” is relatively straightforward to understand, “form” is a more general, theoretical, metaphysical, and abstract concept. “Form” is the generalization and idealization of the real world. For example, Plato suggests that though beautiful people and beautiful flowers possess beauty, beauty itself, as a “form”, is more transcendental. Plato separates clearly between form and the physical world. On the other hand, Aristotle admits the deviation between matter and form but claims matter and form don’t exist separately. In other words, everything possesses matter and form simultaneously. A demonstration of Aristotle’s theory exploits the example of a sculpture of Venus. In this case, the matter is marble and the form is Venus. With the same piece of marble, sculptors can transform the same piece of marble into other characters. Aristotle explains changes as always happening since things always take on new forms, and changes happen with both matter and form since matter and form are impartible. How change becomes perceptible can be described as decay, motion, growth, etc. The famous four causes proposed by Aristotle -formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause- are the general causes of change.

To explain Aristotle's logic (formal logic), consider the sentence “Plato is walking”. In this sentence, “walking” is meaningless without a subject, which means “walking” cannot exist without a subject. Still, various subjects can complete walking. Therefore, walking is universal and is inherent in items. “Plato” in this sentence is particular, referring to the person who founded the Academy, and we can immediately connect the word with the signified. Indisputably Plato has many specific traits such as living in Greece and constructing the “Republic”, he also has more universal traits as a human, such as being mortal. Concluding the above lines and classifying the mentioned traits, the below table is gained.

As a traditional custom of metaphysics and a prominent portion of the table, the right-down block of the table gathers attention. Possessing both universality and inherence, “categories” are thought of as the internal nature of things by Aristotle. Categories” are also considered impersonal by Aristotle, which means they are not created or imagined by humans. With this in mind, Aristotle constructs his category table into two ten distinct sections, involving quantity (how much), quality, position (where), time, place, action…Initially, he only included nine categories, but he added to them later on. Kant as a more modern philosopher constructed a similar category table but the way that they obtained the table is different; the content is also different. To justify “categories”, Aristotle depicted people’s thinking process when they see something: when people think of something, people immediately connect and arrange things into “categories”. Thinking is linked with the way things are. In this case, from substance to categories, Aristotle draws a connection between logic and metaphysics. He also claims that when people think, they make assumptions about substances exist with why. From substance existence to our thinking process, and words, Aristotle makes a contribution to the cognitive process.

Another well-known theory of Aristotle is the syllogism, as we may encounter syllogism in high school English classes. Succinctly recap the composition of syllogism, it consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. Aristotle exploits syllogism as an instrument for scientific demonstration. Intuitionally, the accuracy of the premise is very crucial. There are few channels for obtaining premises, including opinions that are almost universally accepted (dialectal), viewpoints that seem to be prevalently admitted but actually not (eristic), and true and transcendental laws (demonstrative). Within the true and transcendental laws, Aristotle believes that there exists something called the “first principle” in advance. The first principle is the most reliable source of knowledge and the most accurate premise. To arrive at the first principle, Aristotle proposed that the path comes from people’s observation and induction in daily life. Whenever a person is first exposed to something, the subject is stored in one’s memory. After repeated exposure to substances with similar traits, the person then gains a general understanding of the principle behind that specific substance. From particular to general, from accidental to essential, the process of induction was carried out to attain the first principle. For instance, by adding one block and another block together, we know that we now have two blocks. The universal law behind this intuition is the mathematical equation 1+1=2, which is knowable to us. Though we are now clear with what is and how to obtain the first principle, the authenticity of it may be still doubted. Aristotle verified the first principle by stating it aligns with how our mind functions. To be more specific, our thoughts, from intuition, necessarily involve seeing and recognizing truth. As a reminder, the first principle cannot be acquired by pure logical reasoning since it will fall in eternal and infinite reasoning. The invalidation of logic also suggests that substance is the primary essence.