Aristotle

[[File:Aristotle by Raphael.jpg|right|thumb|165px|Aristotle from Raphael's ''The School of Athens''.]]{{philosophy|1}}{{cquote|Aristotle, it should be said, has been one of the great misfortunes of the human race.|4=[[Bertrand Russell]]|5=''The Scientific Outlook''<ref>{{cite book|last1=Russell|first1=Bertrand A.W.|authorlink1=Bertrand Russell|title=The Scientific Outlook|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=978-0-415-47462-7|page=25}}</ref>}}
'''Aristotle''' {{lived|384 BCE|322 BCE}} was an influential 
Geek
 [[Greece|Greek]] 
bugger for the bottle<ref>See [[Monty Python]]'s [[Fun:Philosopher|''Philosophers' Song'']]</ref>
 thinker living in the 4th century [[BCE]] whose ideas formed a large part of the basis for Western thought, especially in [[politics]] and [[logic]], transmitted to the West via contact with Muslim scholars and traders who had diligently preserved ancient Greek texts and expanded upon them as well.<ref>{{wpa|Recovery of Aristole}}</ref> See our article on [[Al-Farabi]] for just one of the many scholars of the {{wpl|Islamic Golden Age}} whom Aristotelian thought heavily influenced.

As CollegeBinary once put it, he did very well for himself for a man who thought the sun orbited around the Earth and that his underpants were made out of fire.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0Uq08xXhY Three Minute Philosophy: Aristotle] YouTube</ref>

==Basically...==
Of the Greek philosophers, Aristotle probably has the largest body of surviving work. While Greek philosophy before [[Socrates]] and [[Plato]] was generally written in verse, and all of Plato's works in dialogues, Aristotle's surviving works appear as prose treatises, usually in major works outlining principles of a study (though he was noted to have written dialogues by contemporaneous authors, although all of them have been lost to time<ref>[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MissingEpisode/Literature Literature/Missing Episode], TV Tropes</ref>). He also wrote smaller treatises about specific topics, such as the dissection of marine animals. He actually viewed his career as a zoologist as the most important thing he did, and his findings were certainly on the more solid side given what he had to go off of, if only because of his habit of engaging in observations when it came to biology.<ref>[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagnumOpusDissonance Magnum Opus Dissonance], TV Tropes</ref> With that said, he was still far from perfect in this regard, with some of his claims, such as the idea that eels don't reproduce, being totally debunked by modern science.<ref>[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/6-things-aristotle-got-wr_b_5920840 6 Things Aristotle Got Wrong] The Huffington Post</ref>

The major works are usually identified as ''Metaphysics'', ''Physics'', ''Politics'', ''Nicomachean Ethics'', ''On the Soul'', ''The History of Animals/On the Parts of Animals/On the Generation of Animals'', ''Rhetoric'' and ''Poetics'', and the six works that make up the ''{{wpl|Organon}}''. The genre of all his work is somewhat uncertain. While the ''Nicomachean Ethics'' is quite approachable, and at times indicates it may be written as a long argumentative epistle (possibly about a very specific issue at hand), the ''Metaphysics'' and other treatises are rather dense and difficult, and may be either one of his students' lecture notes (which we know is true of the ''Constitution of Athens''), or written as his attempts to severely compress the material (which Aquinas and the scholastics believed).

The usual route taken in understanding Aristotle is taking his philosophy as opposed to Plato's. While Plato believes nearly everything to be originating in eternal forms ultimately alien to the world, Aristotle believes most things in the universe are defined strictly by their properties. This led him to more modern means of investigation, like experimenting rather than speculating as far from the evidence as possible. He was widely skilled in dissection, and many of his treatises about the parts of animals seem very modern because of it. Hence the focal point of Raphael's painting {{wpl|The School of Athens|The School of Athens}} being Plato pointing up to "heavenly" forms and Aristotle point down to "things as they are."

However, Aristotle believed, with Plato, in at least some governing principle giving design to the Universe. His proof (in ''The Metaphysics'') of this did not necessarily lie with the way things themselves were made (as Plato's argument was), but based on the pre-Socratic Parmenides, tracing all motion back; eventually to what a conception his commentators would call causality. It requires the force of an [[Argument from first cause|Original Unmoved Mover]]. The result is a doctrine much more complicated than [[Goddidit|its usual modern intepretation]], which is often blamed (by modern Aristotelians) on Plotinus' simplistic fetishization of the Unmoved Mover argument. The full argument for and about causation for Aristotle is prevalent throughout the rest of his work, including the ''Nicomachean Ethics'', and leads him to some shockingly novel ideas about human responsibility, and the nature of action. Causality principles are also one of the only ways of bypassing [[Hume's law|the is-ought problem]].

His works were lost to Europe during the Middle Ages, except for ''Categories'' and ''On Interpretation''. The rest of them were, at the time, still very popular and wide-spread in the Muslim East, and the first attempts to reclaim them were usually clumsy back-translations from Arabic translations in the tenth century. In the Twelfth Century, Thomas Aquinas (yes, again) asked William of Moerbeke to translate some of the recently retrieved Greek manuscripts into [[Latin]] (proficiency in Early Greek was extremely rare in the Middle Ages), which he did with shocking objectivity, not adding any marginal glosses nor making distinctions of heretical or kosher material. Some point to this as the first gesture towards the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

==Physics==
Aristotle's four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water were an early attempt to describe all of nature as being composed of basic substances. They were believed to be counterparts of four of the five Platonic bodies, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, and icosahedron. The fifth element, "quintessence" (sometimes instead called the "[[Luminiferous aether]]"), was conceived as a counterpart of the dodecahedron, and it was believed to be the material of the [[Moon]], the [[planet]]s and the [[star]]s.<ref>[http://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/aristotle-physics.html Aristotle's Physics]</ref><ref>[http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/433/arintro.htm Introduction to Aristotle]</ref> Though he was a [[geocentrist]], as were most Greeks at the time, he did subscribe to {{wpl|Eratosthenes}}' theory that the earth was round. Many modern scholars and scientists have noted a direct correlation between Aristotle's four elements and modern physics' four primary states of matter; with the earth being equivalent to solids, fire being equivalent to plasma, air being equivalent to gas, and water being equivalent to liquids.{{cn}}

Another ancient Greek philosopher, [[Aristarchus of Samos|Aristarchus]], saw that the [[Earth]] orbited around the [[Sun]] like the rest of the [[Solar System]]<ref>[http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Aristarchus.html MacTutor History of Mathematics]</ref>. However, this was largely ignored by Western tradition until the rise of [[Copernicus]] some 1700 years later.
 
Aristotelian concepts are thought by skeptics to have played a large part in the ethics and worldview of the Jewish [[Rabbi]], [[Jesus Christ]].<ref>[https://philosophynow.org/issues/21/Virtue_ethics_and_the_New_Testament Virtue ethics and the New Testament]</ref>

As such, it took the West a long time to get over the fundamental errors (we all make mistakes, after all) and get [[scientific method|things]] moving in a positive direction.  The early [[Common Era]] in the West was marked with a high degree of dogmatism, as opposed to the fluid condition of philosophy in Greece, so instead of arguing with, improving, or even overthrowing Aristotelian concepts, his ideas were rather [[ten Commandments|set in stone]], contrary to how he and his peers treated ideas in his time.

While Thales of Miletus was the first scientist (philosopher and mathematician) in recorded history,<ref>Reimer L, Reimer W. ''Mathematicians are people, too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians.'' Palo Alto, CA: Dale Seymour Publications; 1990. </ref> Aristotle has been much more influential. Indeed, [[Galileo Galilei]] and [[Isaac Newton]] earned their shining reputations in part by showing why Aristotle's physics was badly misguided.

==Politics==
Aristote's ethics were intimately intertwined with his politics, which in turn was grounded in biology. He famously described man as "a political animal," meaning a living being meant for life in the city-state (or ''polis''). For Aristotle, a living being's ethos should be oriented towards what enables it to flourish, that is, fulfill its capacities and final end. For example, it is in an acorn's nature to become an oak tree. Similarly, civic and contemplative life in the city-state is the setting in which human beings can fully actualize their capacities as rational and social creatures, the former of which sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Unsurprisingly, Aristotle defended the practice of [[slavery]] in his work ''Politics'' as he himself owned slaves.<ref>[https://iep.utm.edu/aristotle-politics/ Aristotle: Politics] by Edward Clayton, ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''.</ref>

==See also==
{{fun|Aristotle and What came after}} 
*[[Aristotelian essentialism]]

==External links==
* [http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Aristotle.html Complete works online]

==References==
{{reflist|2|80%}}

[[Category:Ancient history]]
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[[Category:Slavery apologists]]

Categories: Ancient history, Educators, Greece, History of science, Philosophers, Scientists, Sexism, Slavery apologists