ARISTÓTELES (384 - 322 A.C)

Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for rejecting Plato's theory of forms.

As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas referred to him simply as "The Philosopher." In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive. Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today.

As the father of the field of logic, he was the first to develop a formalized system for reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any argument can be determined by its structure rather than its content. A classic example of a valid argument is his syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Given the structure of this argument, as long as the premises are true, then the conclusion is also guaranteed to be true. Aristotle’s brand of logic dominated this area of thought until the rise of modern propositional logic and predicate logic 2000 years later.

Aristotle’s emphasis on good reasoning combined with his belief in the scientific method forms the backdrop for most of his work. For example, in his work in ethics and politics, Aristotle identifies the highest good with intellectual virtue; that is, a moral person is one who cultivates certain virtues based on reasoning. And in his work on psychology and the soul, Aristotle distinguishes sense perception from reason, which unifies and interprets the sense perceptions and is the source of all knowledge.

Aristotle famously rejected Plato’s theory of forms, which states that properties such as beauty are abstract universal entities that exist independent of the objects themselves. Instead, he argued that forms are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them, and so must be studied in relation to them. However, in discussing art, Aristotle seems to reject this, and instead argues for idealized universal form which artists attempt to capture in their work.

Aristotle was the founder of the Lyceum, a school of learning based in Athens, Greece; and he was an inspiration for the Peripatetics, his followers from the Lyceum.

1. Life

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at Stagirus, a now extinct Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and from this began Aristotle's long association with the Macedonian Court, which considerably influenced his life. While he was still a boy his father died. At age 17 his guardian, Proxenus, sent him to Athens, the intellectual center of the world, to complete his education. He joined the Academy and studied under Plato, attending his lectures for a period of twenty years. In the later years of his association with Plato and the Academy he began to lecture on his own account, especially on the subject of rhetoric. At the death of Plato in 347, the pre-eminent ability of Aristotle would seem to have designated him to succeed to the leadership of the Academy. But his divergence from Plato's teaching was too great to make this possible, and Plato's nephew Speusippus was chosen instead. At the invitation of his friend Hermeas, ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, Aristotle left for his court. He stayed three year and, while there, married Pythias, the niece of the King. In later life he was married a second time to a woman named Herpyllis, who bore him a son, Nichomachus. At the end of three years Hermeas was overtaken by the Persians, and Aristotle went to Mytilene. At the invitation of Philip of Macedonia he became the tutor of his 13 year old son Alexander (later world conqueror); he did this for the next five years. Both Philip and Alexander appear to have paid Aristotle high honor, and there were stories that Aristotle was supplied by the Macedonian court, not only with funds for teaching, but also with thousands of slaves to collect specimens for his studies in natural science. These stories are probably false and certainly exaggerated.

Upon the death of Philip, Alexander succeeded to the kingship and prepared for his subsequent conquests. Aristotle's work being finished, he returned to Athens, which he had not visited since the death of Plato. He found the Platonic school flourishing under Xenocrates, and Platonism the dominant philosophy of Athens. He thus set up his own school at a place called the Lyceum. When teaching at the Lyceum, Aristotle had a habit of walking about as he discoursed. It was in connection with this that his followers became known in later years as the peripatetics, meaning "to walk about." For the next thirteen years he devoted his energies to his teaching and composing his philosophical treatises. He is said to have given two kinds of lectures: the more detailed discussions in the morning for an inner circle of advanced students, and the popular discourses in the evening for the general body of lovers of knowledge. At the sudden death of Alexander in 323 BCE., the pro-Macedonian government in Athens was overthrown, and a general reaction occurred against anything Macedonian. A charge of impiety was trumped up against him. To escape prosecution he fled to Chalcis in Euboea so that (Aristotle says) "The Athenians might not have another opportunity of sinning against philosophy as they had already done in the person of Socrates." In the first year of his residence at Chalcis he complained of a stomach illness and died in 322 BCE.

2. Writings

It is reported that Aristotle's writings were held by his student Theophrastus, who had succeeded Aristotle in leadership of the Peripatetic School. Theophrastus's library passed to his pupil Neleus. To protect the books from theft, Neleus's heirs concealed them in a vault, where they were damaged somewhat by dampness, moths and worms. In this hiding place they were discovered about 100 BCE by Apellicon, a rich book lover, and brought to Athens. They were later taken to Rome after the capture of Athens by Sulla in 86 BCE. In Rome they soon attracted the attention of scholars, and the new edition of them gave fresh impetus to the study of Aristotle and of philosophy in general. This collection is the basis of the works of Aristotle that we have today. Strangely, the list of Aristotle's works given by Diogenes Laertius does not contain any of these treatises. It is possible that Diogenes' list is that of forgeries compiled at a time when the real works were lost to sight.

The works of Aristotle fall under three headings: (1) dialogues and other works of a popular character; (2) collections of facts and material from scientific treatment; and (3) systematic works. Among his writings of a popular nature the only one which we possess of any consequence is the interesting tract On the Polity of the Athenians. The works on the second group include 200 titles, most in fragments, collected by Aristotle's school and used as research. Some may have been done at the time of Aristotle's successor Theophrastus. Included in this group are constitutions of 158 Greek states. The systematic treatises of the third group are marked by a plainness of style, with none of the golden flow of language which the ancients praised in Aristotle. This may be due to the fact that these works were not, in most cases, published by Aristotle himself or during his lifetime, but were edited after his death from unfinished manuscripts. Until Werner Jaeger (1912) it was assumed that Aristotle's writings presented a systematic account of his views. Jaeger argues for an early, middle and late period (genetic approach), where the early period follows Plato's theory of forms and soul, the middle rejects Plato, and the later period (which includes most of his treatises) is more empirically oriented. Aristotle's systematic treatises may be grouped in several divisions:

Logic

Categories (10 classifications of terms)
On Interpretation (propositions, truth, modality)
Prior Analytics (syllogistic logic)
Posterior Analytics (scientific method and syllogism)
Topics (rules for effective arguments and debate)
On Sophistical Refutations (informal fallacies)

Physical works

Physics (explains change, motion, void, time)
On the Heavens (structure of heaven, earth, elements)
On Generation (through combining material constituents)
Meteorologics (origin of comets, weather, disasters)

Psychological works

On the Soul (explains faculties, senses, mind, imagination)
On Memory, Reminiscence, Dreams, and Prophesying

Works on natural history

History of Animals (physical/mental qualities, habits)
On the parts of Animals
On the Movement of Animals
On the Progression of Animals
On the Generation of Animals
Minor treatises
Problems

Philosophical works

Metaphysics (substance, cause, form, potentiality)
Nicomachean Ethics (soul, happiness, virtue, friendship)
Eudemain Ethics
Magna Moralia
Politics (best states, utopias, constitutions, revolutions)
Rhetoric (elements of forensic and political debate)
Poetics (tragedy, epic poetry)

3. Logic

Aristotle's writings on the general subject of logic were grouped by the later Peripatetics under the name Organon, or instrument. From their perspective, logic and reasoning was the chief preparatory instrument of scientific investigation. Aristotle himself, however, uses the term "logic" as equivalent to verbal reasoning. The Categories of Aristotle are classifications of individual words (as opposed to sentences or propositions), and include the following ten: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, situation, condition, action, passion. They seem to be arranged according to the order of the questions we would ask in gaining knowledge of an object. For example, we ask, first, what a thing is, then how great it is, next of what kind it is. Substance is always regarded as the most important of these. Substances are further divided into first and second: first substances are individual objects; second substances are the species in which first substances or individuals inhere.

Notions when isolated do not in themselves express either truth or falsehood: it is only with the combination of ideas in a proposition that truth and falsity are possible. The elements of such a proposition are the noun substantive and the verb. The combination of words gives rise to rational speech and thought, conveys a meaning both in its parts and as a whole. Such thought may take many forms, but logic considers only demonstrative forms which express truth and falsehood. The truth or falsity of propositions is determined by their agreement or disagreement with the facts they represent. Thus propositions are either affirmative or negative, each of which again may be either universal or particular or undesignated. A definition, for Aristotle is a statement of the essential character of a subject, and involves both the genus and the difference. To get at a true definition we must find out those qualities within the genus which taken separately are wider than the subject to be defined, but taken together are precisely equal to it. For example, "prime," "odd," and "number" are each wider than "triplet" (that is, a collection of any three items, such as three rocks); but taken together they are just equal to it. The genus definition must be formed so that no species is left out. Having determined the genus and species, we must next find the points of similarity in the species separately and then consider the common characteristics of different species. Definitions may be imperfect by (1) being obscure, (2) by being too wide, or (3) by not stating the essential and fundamental attributes. Obscurity may arise from the use of equivocal expressions, of metaphorical phrases, or of eccentric words. The heart of Aristotle's logic is the syllogism, the classic example of which is as follows: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. The syllogistic form of logical argumentation dominated logic for 2,000 years until the rise of modern propositional and predicate logic thanks to Frege, Russell, and others.

4. Metaphysics

Aristotle's editors gave the name "Metaphysics" to his works on first philosophy, either because they went beyond or followed after his physical investigations. Aristotle begins by sketching the history of philosophy. For Aristotle, philosophy arose historically after basic necessities were secured. It grew out of a feeling of curiosity and wonder, to which religious myth gave only provisional satisfaction. The earliest speculators (i.e. Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander) were philosophers of nature. The Pythagoreans succeeded these with mathematical abstractions. The level of pure thought was reached partly in the Eleatic philosophers (such as Parmenides) and Anaxagoras, but more completely in the work of Socrates. Socrates' contribution was the expression of general conceptions in the form of definitions, which he arrived at by induction and analogy. For Aristotle, the subject of metaphysics deals with the first principles of scientific knowledge and the ultimate conditions of all existence. More specifically, it deals with existence in its most fundamental state (i.e. being as being), and the essential attributes of existence. This can be contrasted with mathematics which deals with existence in terms of lines or angles, and not existence as it is in itself. In its universal character, metaphysics superficially resembles dialectics and sophistry. However, it differs from dialectics which is tentative, and it differs from sophistry which is a pretence of knowledge without the reality.

The axioms of science fall under the consideration of the metaphysician insofar as they are properties ofall existence. Aristotle argues that there are a handful of universal truths. Against the followers of Heraclitus and Protagoras, Aristotle defends both the laws of contradiction, and that of excluded middle. He does this by showing that their denial is suicidal. Carried out to its logical consequences, the denial of these laws would lead to the sameness of all facts and all assertions. It would also result in an indifference in conduct. As the science of being as being, the leading question of Aristotle's metaphysics is, What is meant by the real or true substance? Plato tried to solve the same question by positing a universal and invariable element of knowledge and existence -- the forms -- as the only real permanent besides the changing phenomena of the senses. Aristotle attacks Plato's theory of the forms on three different grounds.

First, Aristotle argues, forms are powerless to explain changes of things and a thing's ultimate extinction. Forms are not causes of movement and alteration in the physical objects of sensation. Second, forms are equally incompetent to explain how we arrive at knowledge of particular things. For, to have knowledge of a particular object, it must be knowledge of the substance which is in that things. However, the forms place knowledge outside of particular things. Further, to suppose that we know particular things better by adding on their general conceptions of their forms, is about as absurd as to imagine that we can count numbers better by multiplying them. Finally, if forms were needed to explain our knowledge of particular objects, then forms must be used to explain our knowledge of objects of art; however, Platonists do not recognize such forms. The third ground of attack is that the forms simply cannot explain the existence of particular objects. Plato contends that forms do not exist in the particular objects which partake in the forms. However, that substance of a particular thing cannot be separated from the thing itself. Further, aside from the jargon of "participation," Plato does not explain the relation between forms and particular things. In reality, it is merely metaphorical to describe the forms as patterns of things; for, what is a genus to one object is a species to a higher class, the same idea will have to be both a form and a particular thing at the same time. Finally, on Plato's account of the forms, we must imagine an intermediate link between the form and the particular object, and so on ad infinitum: there must always be a "third man" between the individual man and the form of man.

For Aristotle, the form is not something outside the object, but rather in the varied phenomena of sense. Real substance, or true being, is not the abstract form, but rather the concrete individual thing. Unfortunately, Aristotle's theory of substance is not altogether consistent with itself. In the Categories the notion of substance tends to be nominalistic (that is, substance is a concept we apply to things). In theMetaphysics, though, it frequently inclines towards realism (that is, substance has a real existence in itself). We are also struck by the apparent contradiction in his claims that science deals with universal concepts, and substance is declared to be an individual. In any case, substance is for him a merging of matter into form. The term "matter" is used by Aristotle in four overlapping senses. First, it is the underlying structure of changes, particularly changes of growth and of decay. Secondly, it is the potential which has implicitly the capacity to develop into reality. Thirdly, it is a kind of stuff without specific qualities and so is indeterminate and contingent. Fourthly, it is identical with form when it takes on a form in its actualized and final phase.

The development of potentiality to actuality is one of the most important aspects of Aristotle's philosophy. It was intended to solve the difficulties which earlier thinkers had raised with reference to the beginnings of existence and the relations of the one and many. The actual vs. potential state of things is explained in terms of the causes which act on things. There are four causes:

Material cause, or the elements out of which an object is created;
Efficient cause, or the means by which it is created;
Formal cause, or the expression of what it is;
Final cause, or the end for which it is.

Take, for example, a bronze statue. Its material cause is the bronze itself. Its efficient cause is the sculptor, insofar has he forces the bronze into shape. The formal cause is the idea of the completed statue. The final cause is the idea of the statue as it prompts the sculptor to act on the bronze. The final cause tends to be the same as the formal cause, and both of these can be subsumed by the efficient cause. Of the four, it is the formal and final which is the most important, and which most truly gives the explanation of an object. The final end (purpose, or teleology) of a thing is realized in the full perfection of the object itself, not in our conception of it. Final cause is thus internal to the nature of the object itself, and not something we subjectively impose on it.

To Aristotle, God is the first of all substances, the necessary first source of movement who is himself unmoved. God is a being with everlasting life, and perfect blessedness, engaged in never-ending contemplation.

For a fuller discussion, see the article Aristotle's Metaphysics and Western Concepts of God.

5. Philosophy of Nature

Aristotle sees the universe as a scale lying between the two extremes: form without matter is on one end, and matter without form is on the other end. The passage of matter into form must be shown in its various stages in the world of nature. To do this is the object of Aristotle's physics, or philosophy of nature. It is important to keep in mind that the passage from form to matter within nature is a movement towards ends or purposes. Everything in nature has its end and function, and nothing is without its purpose. Everywhere we find evidences of design and rational plan. No doctrine of physics can ignore the fundamental notions of motion, space, and time. Motion is the passage of matter into form, and it is of four kinds: (1) motion which affects the substance of a thing, particularly its beginning and its ending; (2) motion which brings about changes in quality; (3) motion which brings about changes in quantity, by increasing it and decreasing it; and (4) motion which brings about locomotion, or change of place. Of these the last is the most fundamental and important.

Aristotle rejects the definition of space as the void. Empty space is an impossibility. Hence, too, he disagrees with the view of Plato and the Pythagoreans that the elements are composed of geometrical figures. Space is defined as the limit of the surrounding body towards what is surrounded. Time is defined as the measure of motion in regard to what is earlier and later. It thus depends for its existence upon motion. If there where no change in the universe, there would be no time. Since it is the measuring or counting of motion, it also depends for its existence on a counting mind. If there were no mind to count, there could be no time. As to the infinite divisibility of space and time, and the paradoxes proposed byZeno, Aristotle argues that space and time are potentially divisible ad infinitum, but are not actually so divided.

After these preliminaries, Aristotle passes to the main subject of physics, the scale of being. The first thing to notice about this scale is that it is a scale of values. What is higher on the scale of being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced in it. Species on this scale are eternally fixed in their place, and cannot evolve over time. The higher items on the scale are also more organized. Further, the lower items are inorganic and the higher are organic. The principle which gives internal organization to the higher or organic items on the scale of being is life, or what he calls the soul of the organism. Even the human soul is nothing but the organization of the body. Plants are the lowest forms of life on the scale, and their souls contain a nutritive element by which it preserves itself. Animals are above plants on the scale, and their souls contain an appetitive feature which allows them to have sensations, desires, and thus gives them the ability to move. The scale of being proceeds from animals to humans. The human soul shares the nutritive element with plants, and the appetitive element with animals, but also has a rational element which is distinctively our own. The details of the appetitive and rational aspects of the soul are described in the following two sections.

For a fuller discussion of these topics, see the article Aristotle: Motion and its Place in Nature.

6. The Soul and Psychology

Soul is defined by Aristotle as the perfect expression or realization of a natural body. From this definition it follows that there is a close connection between psychological states, and physiological processes. Body and soul are unified in the same way that wax and an impression stamped on it are unified. Metaphysicians before Aristotle discussed the soul abstractly without any regard to the bodily environment; this, Aristotle believes, was a mistake. At the same time, Aristotle regards the soul or mind not as the product of the physiological conditions of the body, but as the truth of the body -- the substance in which only the bodily conditions gain their real meaning.

The soul manifests its activity in certain "faculties" or "parts" which correspond with the stages of biological development, and are the faculties of nutrition (peculiar to plants), that of movement (peculiar to animals), and that of reason (peculiar to humans). These faculties resemble mathematical figures in which the higher includes the lower, and must be understood not as like actual physical parts, but like suchaspects as convex and concave which we distinguish in the same line. The mind remains throughout a unity: and it is absurd to speak of it, as Plato did, as desiring with one part and feeling anger with another. Sense perception is a faculty of receiving the forms of outward objects independently of the matter of which they are composed, just as the wax takes on the figure of the seal without the gold or other metal of which the seal is composed. As the subject of impression, perception involves a movement and a kind of qualitative change; but perception is not merely a passive or receptive affection. It in turn acts, and,distinguishing between the qualities of outward things, becomes "a movement of the soul through the medium of the body."

The objects of the senses may be either (1) special, (such as color is the special object of sight, and sound of hearing), (2) common, or apprehended by several senses in combination (such as motion or figure), or (3) incidental or inferential (such as when from the immediate sensation of white we come to know a person or object which is white). There are five special senses. Of these, touch is the must rudimentary, hearing the most instructive, and sight the most ennobling. The organ in these senses never acts directly , but is affected by some medium such as air. Even touch, which seems to act by actual contact, probably involves some vehicle of communication. For Aristotle, the heart is the common or central sense organ. It recognizes the common qualities which are involved in all particular objects of sensation. It is, first, the sense which brings us a consciousness of sensation. Secondly, in one act before the mind, it holds up the objects of our knowledge and enables us to distinguish between the reports of different senses.

Aristotle defines the imagination as "the movement which results upon an actual sensation." In other words, it is the process by which an impression of the senses is pictured and retained before the mind, and is accordingly the basis of memory. The representative pictures which it provides form the materials of reason. Illusions and dreams are both alike due to an excitement in the organ of sense similar to that which would be caused by the actual presence of the sensible phenomenon. Memory is defined as the permanent possession of the sensuous picture as a copy which represents the object of which it is a picture. Recollection, or the calling back to mind the residue of memory, depends on the laws which regulate the association of our ideas. We trace the associations by starting with the thought of the object present to us, then considering what is similar, contrary or contiguous.

Reason is the source of the first principles of knowledge. Reason is opposed to the sense insofar as sensations are restricted and individual, and thought is free and universal. Also, while the senses deals with the concrete and material aspect of phenomena, reason deals with the abstract and ideal aspects. But while reason is in itself the source of general ideas, it is so only potentially. For, it arrives at them only by a process of development in which it gradually clothes sense in thought, and unifies and interprets sense-presentations. This work of reason in thinking beings suggests the question: How can immaterial thought come to receive material things? It is only possible in virtue of some community between thought and things. Aristotle recognizes an active reason which makes objects of thought. This is distinguished from passive reason which receives, combines and compares the objects of thought. Active reason makes the world intelligible, and bestows on the materials of knowledge those ideas or categories which make them accessible to thought. This is just as the sun communicates to material objects that light, without which color would be invisible, and sight would have no object. Hence reason is the constant support of an intelligible world. While assigning reason to the soul of humans, Aristotle describes it as coming from without, and almost seems to identify it with God as the eternal and omnipresent thinker. Even in humans, in short, reason realizes something of the essential characteristic of absolute thought -- the unity of thought as subject with thought as object.

7. Ethics

Ethics, as viewed by Aristotle, is an attempt to find out our chief end or highest good: an end which he maintains is really final. Though many ends of life are only means to further ends, our aspirations and desires must have some final object or pursuit. Such a chief end is universally called happiness. But people mean such different things by the expression that he finds it necessary to discuss the nature of it for himself. For starters, happiness must be based on human nature, and must begin from the facts of personal experience. Thus, happiness cannot be found in any abstract or ideal notion, like Plato's self-existing good. It must be something practical and human. It must then be found in the work and life which is unique to humans. But this is neither the vegetative life we share with plants nor the sensitive existence which we share with animals. It follows therefore that true happiness lies in the active life of a rational being or in a perfect realization and outworking of the true soul and self, continued throughout a lifetime.

Aristotle expands his notion of happiness through an analysis of the human soul which structures and animates a living human organism. The parts of the soul are divided as follows:

	Calculative -- Intellectual Virtue
Rational
	Appetitive -- Moral Virtue
Irrational
	Vegetative -- Nutritional Virtue

The human soul has an irrational element which is shared with the animals, and a rational element which is distinctly human. The most primitive irrational element is the vegetative faculty which is responsible for nutrition and growth. An organism which does this well may be said to have a nutritional virtue. The second tier of the soul is the appetitive faculty which is responsible for our emotions and desires (such as joy, grief, hope and fear). This faculty is both rational and irrational. It is irrational since even animals experience desires. However, it is also rational since humans have the distinct ability to control these desires with the help of reason. The human ability to properly control these desires is called moral virtue, and is the focus of morality. Aristotle notes that there is a purely rational part of the soul, the calculative, which is responsible for the human ability to contemplate, reason logically, and formulate scientific principles. The mastery of these abilities is called intellectual virtue.

Aristotle continues by making several general points about the nature of moral virtues (i.e. desire-regulating virtues). First, he argues that the ability to regulate our desires is not instinctive, but learned and is the outcome of both teaching and practice. Second, he notes that if we regulate our desires either too much or too little, then we create problems. As an analogy, Aristotle comments that, either "excess or deficiency of gymnastic exercise is fatal to strength." Third, he argues that desire-regulating virtues are character traits, and are not to be understood as either emotions or mental faculties.

The core of Aristotle's account of moral virtue is his doctrine of the mean. According to this doctrine, moral virtues are desire-regulating character traits which are at a mean between more extreme character traits (or vices). For example, in response to the natural emotion of fear, we should develop the virtuous character trait of courage. If we develop an excessive character trait by curbing fear too much, then we are said to be rash, which is a vice. If, on the other extreme, we develop a deficient character trait by curbing fear too little, then we are said to be cowardly, which is also a vice. The virtue of courage, then, lies at the mean between the excessive extreme of rashness, and the deficient extreme of cowardice. Aristotle is quick to point out that the virtuous mean is not a strict mathematical mean between two extremes. For example, if eating 100 apples is too many, and eating zero apples is too little, this does not imply that we should eat 50 apples, which is the mathematical mean. Instead, the mean is rationally determined, based on the relative merits of the situation. That is, it is "as a prudent man would determine it." He concludes that it is difficult to live the virtuous life primarily because it is often difficult to find the mean between the extremes.

Most moral virtues, and not just courage, are to be understood as falling at the mean between two accompanying vices. His list may be represented by the following table:

Vice of Deficiency	Virtuous Mean	Vice of Excess
Cowardice	Courage	Rashness
Insensibility	Temperance	Intemperance
Illiberality	Liberality	Prodigality
Pettiness	Munificence	Vulgarity
Humble-mindedness	High-mindedness	Vaingloriness
Want of Ambition	Right Ambition	Over-ambition
Spiritlessness	Good Temper	Irascibility
Surliness	Friendly Civility	Obsequiousness
Ironical Depreciation	Sincerity	Boastfulness
Boorishness	Wittiness	Buffoonery
Shamelessness	Modesty	Bashfulness
Callousness	Just Resentment	Spitefulness

The prominent virtue of this list is high-mindedness, which, as being a kind of ideal self-respect, is regarded as the crown of all the other virtues, depending on them for its existence, and itself in turn tending to intensify their force. The list seems to be more a deduction from the formula than a statement of the facts on which the formula itself depends, and Aristotle accordingly finds language frequently inadequate to express the states of excess or defect which his theory involves (for example in dealing with the virtue of ambition). Throughout the list he insists on the "autonomy of will" as indispensable to virtue: courage for instance is only really worthy of the name when done from a love of honor and duty: munificence again becomes vulgarity when it is not exercised from a love of what is right and beautiful, but for displaying wealth.

Justice is used both in a general and in a special sense. In its general sense it is equivalent to the observance of law. As such it is the same thing as virtue, differing only insofar as virtue exercises the disposition simply in the abstract, and justice applies it in dealings with people. Particular justice displays itself in two forms. First, distributive justice hands out honors and rewards according to the merits of the recipients. Second, corrective justice takes no account of the position of the parties concerned, but simply secures equality between the two by taking away from the advantage of the one and adding it to the disadvantage of the other. Strictly speaking, distributive and corrective justice are more than mere retaliation and reciprocity. However, in concrete situations of civil life, retaliation and reciprocity is an adequate formula since such circumstances involve money, depending on a relation between producer and consumer. Since absolute justice is abstract in nature, in the real world it must be supplemented with equity, which corrects and modifies the laws of justice where it falls short. Thus, morality requires a standard which will not only regulate the inadequacies of absolute justice but be also an idea of moral progress.

This idea of morality is given by the faculty of moral insight. The truly good person is at the same time a person of perfect insight, and a person of perfect insight is also perfectly good. Our idea of the ultimate end of moral action is developed through habitual experience, and this gradually frames itself out of particular perceptions. It is the job of reason to apprehend and organize these particular perceptions. However, moral action is never the result of a mere act of the understanding, nor is it the result of a simple desire which views objects merely as things which produce pain or pleasure. We start with a rational conception of what is advantageous, but this conception is in itself powerless without the natural impulse which will give it strength. The will or purpose implied by morality is thus either reason stimulated to act by desire, or desire guided and controlled by understanding. These factors then motivate the willful action. Freedom of the will is a factor with both virtuous choices and vicious choices. Actions are involuntary only when another person forces our action, or if we are ignorant of important details in actions. Actions are voluntary when the originating cause of action (either virtuous or vicious) lies in ourselves.

Moral weakness of the will results in someone does what is wrong, knowing that it is right, and yet follows his desire against reason. For Aristotle, this condition is not a myth, as Socrates supposed it was. The problem is a matter of conflicting moral principles. Moral action may be represented as a syllogism in which a general principle of morality forms the first (i.e. major) premise, while the particular application is the second (i.e. minor) premise. The conclusion, though, which is arrived at through speculation, is not always carried out in practice. The moral syllogism is not simply a matter of logic, but involves psychological drives and desires. Desires can lead to a minor premise being applied to one rather than another of two major premises existing in the agent's mind. Animals, on the other hand, cannot be called weak willed or incontinent since such a conflict of principles is not possible with them.

Pleasure is not to be identified with Good. Pleasure is found in the consciousness of free spontaneous action. It is an invisible experience, like vision, and is always present when a perfect organ acts upon a perfect object. Pleasures accordingly differ in kind, varying along with the different value of the functions of which they are the expression. They are determined ultimately by the judgment of "the good person." Our chief end is the perfect development of our true nature; it thus must be particularly found in the realization of our highest faculty, that is, reason. It is this in fact which constitutes our personality, and we would not be pursuing our own life, but the life of some lower being, if we followed any other aim. Self-love accordingly may be said to be the highest law of morals, because while such self-love may be understood as the selfishness which gratifies a person's lower nature, it may also be, and is rightly, the love of that higher and rational nature which constitutes each person's true self. Such a life of thought is further recommended as that which is most pleasant, most self-sufficient, most continuous, and most consonant with our purpose. It is also that which is most akin to the life of God: for God cannot be conceived as practising the ordinary moral virtues and must therefore find his happiness in contemplation.

Friendship is an indispensable aid in framing for ourselves the higher moral life; if not itself a virtue, it is at least associated with virtue, and it proves itself of service in almost all conditions of our existence. Such results, however, are to be derived not from the worldly friendships of utility or pleasure, but only from those which are founded on virtue. The true friend is in fact a second self, and the true moral value of friendship lies in the fact that the friend presents to us a mirror of good actions, and so intensifies our consciousness and our appreciation of life.

For a fuller discussion of these topics, see the article Aristotle's Ethics.

8. Politics

Aristotle does not regard politics as a separate science from ethics, but as the completion, and almost a verification of it. The moral ideal in political administration is only a different aspect of that which also applies to individual happiness. Humans are by nature social beings, and the possession of rational speech (logos) in itself leads us to social union. The state is a development from the family through the village community, an offshoot of the family. Formed originally for the satisfaction of natural wants, it exists afterwards for moral ends and for the promotion of the higher life. The state in fact is no mere local union for the prevention of wrong doing, and the convenience of exchange. It is also no mere institution for the protection of goods and property. It is a genuine moral organization for advancing the development of humans.

The family, which is chronologically prior to the state, involves a series of relations between husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. Aristotle regards the slave as a piece of live property having no existence except in relation to his master. Slavery is a natural institution because there is a ruling and a subject class among people related to each other as soul to body; however, we must distinguish between those who are slaves by nature, and those who have become slaves merely by war and conquest. Household management involves the acquisition of riches, but must be distinguished from money-making for its own sake. Wealth is everything whose value can be measured by money; but it is the use rather than the possession of commodities which constitutes riches.

Financial exchange first involved bartering. However, with the difficulties of transmission between countries widely separated from each other, money as a currency arose. At first it was merely a specific amount of weighted or measured metal. Afterwards it received a stamp to mark the amount. Demand is the real standard of value. Currency, therefore, is merely a convention which represents the demand; it stands between the producer and the recipient and secures fairness. Usury is an unnatural and reprehensible use of money.

The communal ownership of wives and property as sketched by Plato in the Republic rests on a false conception of political society. For, the state is not a homogeneous unity, as Plato believed, but rather is made up of dissimilar elements. The classification of constitutions is based on the fact that government may be exercised either for the good of the governed or of the governing, and may be either concentrated in one person or shared by a few or by the many. There are thus three true forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and constitutional republic. The perverted forms of these are tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. The difference between the last two is not that democracy is a government of the many, and oligarchy of the few; instead, democracy is the state of the poor, and oligarchy of the rich. Considered in the abstract, these six states stand in the following order of preference: monarchy, aristocracy, constitutional republic, democracy, oligarchy, tyranny. But though with a perfect person monarchy would be the highest form of government, the absence of such people puts it practically out of consideration. Similarly, true aristocracy is hardly ever found in its uncorrupted form. It is in the constitution that the good person and the good citizen coincide. Ideal preferences aside, then, the constitutional republic is regarded as the best attainable form of government, especially as it secures that predominance of a large middle class, which is the chief basis of permanence in any state. With the spread of population, democracy is likely to become the general form of government.

Which is the best state is a question that cannot be directly answered. Different races are suited for different forms of government, and the question which meets the politician is not so much what is abstractly the best state, but what is the best state under existing circumstances. Generally, however, the best state will enable anyone to act in the best and live in the happiest manner. To serve this end the ideal state should be neither too great nor too small, but simply self-sufficient. It should occupy a favorable position towards land and sea and consist of citizens gifted with the spirit of the northern nations, and the intelligence of the Asiatic nations. It should further take particular care to exclude from government all those engaged in trade and commerce; "the best state will not make the "working man" a citizen; it should provide support religious worship; it should secure morality through the educational influences of law and early training. Law, for Aristotle, is the outward expression of the moral ideal without the bias of human feeling. It is thus no mere agreement or convention, but a moral force coextensive with all virtue. Since it is universal in its character, it requires modification and adaptation to particular circumstances through equity.

Education should be guided by legislation to make it correspond with the results of psychological analysis, and follow the gradual development of the bodily and mental faculties. Children should during their earliest years be carefully protected from all injurious associations, and be introduced to such amusements as will prepare them for the serious duties of life. Their literary education should begin in their seventh year, and continue to their twenty-first year. This period is divided into two courses of training, one from age seven to puberty, and the other from puberty to age twenty-one. Such education should not be left to private enterprise, but should be undertaken by the state. There are four main branches of education: reading and writing, Gymnastics, music, and painting. They should not be studied to achieve a specific aim, but in the liberal spirit which creates true freemen. Thus, for example, gymnastics should not be pursued by itself exclusively, or it will result in a harsh savage type of character. Painting must not be studied merely to prevent people from being cheated in pictures, but to make them attend to physical beauty. Music must not be studied merely for amusement, but for the moral influence which it exerts on the feelings. Indeed all true education is, as Plato saw, a training of our sympathies so that we may love and hate in a right manner.

For a fuller discussion of these topics, see the article Aristotle's Politics.

9. Art and Poetics

Art is defined by Aristotle as the realization in external form of a true idea, and is traced back to that natural love of imitation which characterizes humans, and to the pleasure which we feel in recognizing likenesses. Art however is not limited to mere copying. It idealizes nature and completes its deficiencies: it seeks to grasp the universal type in the individual phenomenon. The distinction therefore between poetic art and history is not that the one uses meter, and the other does not. The distinction is that while history is limited to what has actually happened, poetry depicts things in their universal character. And, therefore, "poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history." Such imitation may represent people either as better or as worse than people usually are, or it may neither go beyond nor fall below the average standard. Comedy is the imitation of the worse examples of humanity, understood however not in the sense of absolute badness, but only in so far as what is low and ignoble enters into what is laughable and comic.

Tragedy, on the other hand, is the representation of a serious or meaningful, rounded or finished, and more or less extended or far-reaching action -- a representation which is effected by action and not mere narration. It is fitted by portraying events which excite fear and pity in the mind of the observer to purify or purge these feelings and extend and regulate their sympathy. It is thus a homeopathic curing of the passions. Insofar as art in general universalizes particular events, tragedy, in depicting passionate and critical situations, takes the observer outside the selfish and individual standpoint, and views them in connection with the general lot of human beings. This is similar to Aristotle's explanation of the use of orgiastic music in the worship of Bacchas and other deities: it affords an outlet for religious fervor and thus steadies one's religious sentiments.

For a discussion of poetics and dramatic literature, see the article Aristotle's Poetics.

For a discussion of Aristotle's views on biology, see the article Aristotle's Biology.

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Aristotle: Biology

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) may be said to be the first biologist in the Western tradition. Though there are physicians and other natural philosophers who remark on various flora and fauna before Aristotle, none of them brings to his study a systematic critical empiricism. Aristotle’s biological science is important to understand, not only because it gives us a view into the history and philosophy of science, but also because it allows us more deeply to understand his non-biological works, since certain key concepts from Aristotle’s biology repeat themselves in his other writings. Since a significant portion of the corpus of Aristotle’s work is on biology, it is natural to expect his work in biology to resonate in his other writings. One may, for example, use concepts from the biological works to better understand the ethics or metaphysics of Aristotle.

This article will begin with a brief explanation of his biological views and move toward several key explanatory concepts that Aristotle employs. These concepts are essential because they stand as candidates for a philosophy of biology. If Aristotle’s principles are insightful, then he has gone a long way towards creating the first systematic and critical system of biological thought. It is for this reason (rather than the particular observations themselves) that moderns are interested in Aristotle’s biological writings.

1. His Life

Aristotle was born in the year 384 B.C. in the town of Stagira (the modern town Stavros), a coastal Macedonian town to the north of Greece. He was raised at the court of Amyntas where he probably met and was friends with Philip (later to become king and father to Alexander, the Great). When Aristotle was around 18, he was sent to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy. Aristotle spent twenty years at the Academy until Plato’s death, although Diogenes says Aristotle left before Plato’s death. When Plato was succeeded by his nephew, Speusippus, as head of the Academy, Aristotle accepted an invitation to join a former student, Hermeias, who was gathering a Platonic circle about him in Assos in Mysia (near Troy). Aristotle spent three years in this environment. During this time, he may have done some of the natural investigations that later became The History of Animals.

At the end of Aristotle’s stay in Mysia, he moved to Lesbos (an adjacent island). This move may have been prompted by Theophrastus, a fellow of the Academy who was much influenced by Aristotle. It is probable (according to D’Arcy Thompson) that Aristotle performed some important biological investigations during this period.

Aristotle returned to Athens (circa 334-5). This began a period of great productivity. He rented some grounds in woods sacred to Apollo. It was here that Aristotle set-up his school (Diog. Laert V, 51).

At his school Aristotle also accumulated a large number of manuscripts and created a library that was a model for later libraries in Alexandria and Pergamon. According to one tradition, Alexander (his former pupil) paid him a handsome sum of money each year as a form of gratitude (as well as some exotic animals for Aristotle to study that Alexander encountered in his conquests).

At the death of Alexander in 323, Athens once again was full of anti-Macedonian sentiment. A charge of impiety was brought against Aristotle due to a poem he had written for Hermeias. One martyr for philosophy (Socrates) was enough for Aristotle and so he left his school to his colleague, Theophrastus, and fled to the Macedonian Chalcis. Here in 322 he died of a disease that is still the subject of speculation.

2. The Scope of Aristotle’s Biological Works

There is some dispute as to which works should be classified as the biological works of Aristotle. This is indeed a contentious question that is especially difficult for a systematic philosopher such as Aristotle. Generally speaking, a systematic philosopher is one who constructs various philosophical distinctions that, in turn, can be applied to a number of different contexts. Thus, a distinction such as “the more and the less” that has its roots in biology explaining that certain animal parts are greater (bigger) among some individuals and smaller among others, can also be used in the ethics as a cornerstone of the doctrine of the mean as a criterion for virtue. That is, one varies from the mean by the principle of the more and the less. For example, if courage is the mean, then the defect of excess would be “foolhardiness” while the defect of paucity would be “cowardice.” The boundary between what we’d consider “biology” proper vs. what we’d think of as psychology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics is often hard to draw in Aristotle. That’s because Aristotle’s understanding of biology informs his metaphysics and philosophy of mind, but likewise, he often uses the distinctions drawn in his metaphysics in order to deal with biological issues.

In this article, the biological works are: (a) works that deal specifically with biological topics such as: The Parts of Animals (PA), The Generation of Animals (GA), The History of Animals (HA), The Movement of Animals, The Progression of Animals, On Sense and Sensible Objects, On Memory and Recollection, On Sleep and Waking, On Dreams, On Prophecy in Sleep, On Length and Shortness of Life, On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Respiration, On Breath, and On Plants, and (b) the work that deals with psuche (soul), On the Soul—though this work deals with metaphysical issues very explicitly, as well. This list does not include works such as the Metaphysics, Physics, Posterior Analytics, Categories, Nicomachean Ethics, or The Politics even though they contain many arguments that are augmented by an understanding of Aristotle’s biological science. Nor does this article examine any of the reputedly lost works (listed by ancient authors but not existing today) such as Dissections, On Composite Animals, On Sterility, On Physiognomy, and On Medicine . Some of these titles may have sections that have survived in part within the present corpus, but this is doubtful.

3. The Specialist and the Generalist

The distinction between the specialist and the generalist is a good starting point for understanding Aristotle’s philosophy of biology. The specialist is one who has a considerable body of experience in practical fieldwork while the generalist is one who knows many different areas of study. This distinction is brought out in Book One of the Parts of Animals (PA). At PA 639a 1-7 Aristotle says,

In all study and investigation, be it exalted or mundane, there appear to be two types of proficiency: one is that of exact, scientific knowledge while the other is a generalist’s understanding. (my tr.)

Aristotle does not mean to denigrate or to exalt either. Both are necessary for natural investigations. The generalist’s understanding is holistic and puts some area of study into a proper genus, while scientific knowledge deals with causes and definitions at the level of the species. These two skills are demonstrated by the following example:

An example of what I mean is the question of whether one should take a single species and state its differentia independently, for example, homo sapiens nature or the nature of Lions or Oxen, etc., or should we first set down common attributes or a common character (PA 639a 15-19, my tr.).

In other words, the methodology of the specialist would be to observe and catalogue each separate species by itself. The generalist, on the other hand, is drawn to making more global connections through an understanding of the common character of many species. Both skills are needed. Here and elsewhere Aristotle demonstrates the limitations of a single mode of discovery. We cannot simply set out a single path toward scientific investigation—whether it be demonstrative (logical) exactness (the specialist’s understanding) or holistic understanding (the generalist’s knowledge). Neither direction (specialist or generalist) is the one and only way to truth. Really, it is a little of both working in tandem. Sometimes one half takes the lead and sometimes the other. The adoption of several methods is a cornerstone of Aristotelian pluralism, a methodological principle that characterizes much of his work.

When discussing biological science, Aristotle presents the reader two directions: (a) the modes of discovery (genetic order) and (b) the presentation of a completed science (logical order). In the mode of discovery, the specialist sets out all the phenomena in as much detail as possible while the generalist must use her inter-generic knowledge to sort out what may or may not be significant in the event taking place before her. This is because in the mode of discovery, the investigator is in the genetic order. Some possible errors that could be made in this order (for example) might be mistaking certain animal behaviors for an end for which they were not intended. For example, it is very easy to mistake mating behavior for aggressive territorial behavior. Since the generalist has seen many different types of animals, she may be in the best position (on the basis of generic analogy) to classify the sort of behavior in question.

In the mode of discovery one begins with the phenomenon and then seeks to create a causal explanation (PA 646a 25). But how does one go about doing this? In the Posterior Analytics II.19, Aristotle suggests a process of induction that begins with the particular and then moves to the universal. Arriving at the universal entails a comprehensive understanding of some phenomenon. For example, if one wanted to know whether fish sleep, one would first observe fish in their environment. If one of the behaviors of the fish meets the common understanding of sleep (such as being deadened to outside stimulus, showing little to no movement, and so forth), then one may move to the generalization that fish sleep (On Sleeping and Waking 455b 8, cf. On Dreams 458b 9). But one cannot stop there. Once one has determined that fish sleep (via the inductive mode of discovery), it is now up to the researcher to ferret out the causes and reasons why, in a systematic fashion. This second step is the mode of presentation. In this mode the practitioner of biological science seeks to understand why the universal is as it is. Going back to the example of sleeping fish, the scientist would ask why fish need to sleep. Is it by analogy to humans and other animals that seem to gather strength through sleep? What ways might sleep be dangerous (say by opening the individual fish to being eaten)? What do fish do to avoid this?

These, and other questions require the practitioner to work back and forth with what has been set down in the mode of discovery for the purpose of providing an explanation. The most important tools for this exercise are the two modes of causal explanation.

4. The Two Modes of Causal Explanation

For Aristotle there are four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final. The material cause is characterized as “That out of which something existing becomes” (Phys. 194b 24). The material has the potential for the range of final products. Within the material is, in a potential sense, that which is to be formed. Obviously, one piece of wood or metal has the potential to be many artifacts; yet the possibilities are not infinite. The material itself puts constraint upon what can be produced from it. One can execute designs in glass, for example, which could never be brought forth from brass.

The efficient cause is depicted as “that from whence comes the first principle of kinetic change or rest” (Phys. 194b 30). Aristotle gives the example of a male fathering a child as showing an efficient cause. The efficient cause is the trigger that starts a process moving.

The formal cause constitutes the essence of something while the final cause is the purpose of something. For example, Aristotle believed the tongue to be for the purpose of either talking or not. If the tongue was for the purpose of talking (final cause), then it had to be shaped in a certain way, wide and supple so that it might form subtle differences in sound (formal cause). In this way the purpose of the tongue for speaking dovetails with the structural way it might be brought about (P.A. 660a 27-32).

It is generally the case that Aristotle in his biological science interrelates the final and formal causes. For example Aristotle says that the efficient cause may be inadequate to explain change. In the On Generation and Corruption 336a Aristotle states that all natural efficient causes are regulated by formal causes. “It is clear then that fire itself acts and is acted upon.” What this means is that while the fire does act as efficient cause, the manner of this action is regulated by a formal/final cause. The formal cause (via the doctrine of natural place—that arranges an ascending hierarchy among the elements, earth, water, air and fire) dictates that fire is the highest level of the sub-lunar phenomena. Thus, its essence defines its purpose, namely, to travel upward toward its own natural place. In this way the formal and final cause act together to guide the actions of fire (efficient cause) to point upward toward its natural place.

Aristotle (at least in the biological works) invokes a strategy of redundant explanation. Taken at its simplest level, he gives four accounts of everything. However, in the actual practice, it comes about that he really only offers two accounts. In the first account he presents a case for understanding an event via material/kinetic means. For the sake of simplicity, let us call this the ME (materially-based causal explanation) account.

In the second case he presents aspects of essence (formal cause) and purpose (final cause). These are presented together. For the sake of simplicity, let us call this the TE (teleologically-based causal explanation) account. For an example of how these work together, consider respiration.

Aristotle believes that material and efficient causes can give one account of the motions of the air in and out of the lungs for respiration. But this is only part of the story. One must also consider the purpose of respiration and how this essence affects the entire organism (PA 642a 31-642b 4). Thus the combination of the efficient and material causes are lumped together as one sort of explanation ME that focus upon how the nature of hot and cold air form a sort of current that brings in new air and exhales the old. The final and formal causes are linked together as another sort of explanation TE that is tied to why we have respiration in the first place.

In Aristotle’s account respiration we are presented with a partner to TE and ME: necessity. When necessity attaches itself to ME it is called simple or absolute necessity. When necessity attaches itself to TE it is called conditional necessity. Let us return to our example of respiration and examine these concepts in more detail.

First, then there is the formal/final cause of respiration. Respiration exists so that air might be brought into the body for the creation of pneuma (a vital force essential for life). If there were no respiration, there would be no intake of air and no way for it to be heated in the region of the heart and turned intopneuma—an element necessary for life among the blooded animals who live out of water. Thus the TE for respiration is for the sake of producing an essential raw material for the creation of pneuma.

The second mode of explanation, ME, concerns the material and efficient causes related to respiration. These have to do with the manner of a quasi-gas law theory. The hot air in the lungs will tend to stay there unless it is pushed out by the cold incoming air that hurries its exit (cf. On Breath 481b 11). (This is because ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ are two of the essential contraries hot/cold & wet/dry). It is the material natures of the elements that dictate its motions. This is the realm of the ME.

ME is an important mode of explanation because it grounds the practitioner in the empirical facts so that he may not incline himself to offer mere a priori causal accounts. When one is forced to give material and kinetic accounts of some event, then one is grounded in the tangible dynamics of what is happening. This is one important requirement for knowledge.

Now to necessity. Necessity can be represented as a modal operator that can attach itself to either TE or to ME. When it attaches itself to TE, the result is conditional necessity. In conditional necessity one must always begin with the end to be achieved. For example, if one assumes the teleological assumption of natural efficiency, Nature does nothing in vain (GA 741b 5, cf. 739b20, et. al.) then the functions of various animal parts must be viewed within that frame. If we know that respiration is necessary for life, then what animal parts are necessary to allow respiration within different species? The acceptance of the end of respiration causes the investigator to account for how it can occur within a species. The same could be said for other given ends such as “gaining nutrition,” “defending one’s self from attack,” and “reproduction,” among others. When the biologist begins his investigation with some end (whether in the mode of discovery or the mode of scientific presentation), he is creating an account of conditional necessity.

The other sort of necessity is absolute necessity that is the result of matter following its nature (such as fire moving to its natural place). The very nature of the material, itself, creates the dynamics—such as the quasi gas law interactions between the hot and cold air in the lungs. These dynamics may be described without proximate reference to the purpose of the event. In this way ME can function by itself along with simple necessity to give one complete account of an event.

In biological science Aristotle believes that conditional necessity is the most useful of the two necessities in discovery and explanation (PA 639b 25). This is because, in biology, there is a sense that the entire explanation always requires the purpose to set out the boundaries of what is and what is not significant. However, in his practice it is most often the case that Aristotle employs two complete accounts ME and TE in order to reveal different modes of explanation according to his doctrine of pluralism.

5. Aristotle’s Theory of Soul

The word for ‘soul’ in Aristotle is psuche. In Latin it is translated as anima. For many readers, it is the use of the Latin term (particularly as it was used by Christian, Moslem, and Jewish theologians) that forms the basis of our modern understanding of the word. Under the theological tradition, the soul meant an immaterial, detached ruling power within a human. It was immortal and went to God after death. This tradition gave rise to Descartes’ metaphysical dualism: the doctrine that there are two sorts of things that exist (soul and matter), and that soul ruled matter.

Aristotle does not think of soul as the aforementioned theologians do. This is because matter (hyle) and shape (morphe) combine to create a unity not a duality. The philosopher can intellectually abstract out the separate constituents, but in reality they are always united. This unity is often termed hylomorphism (after its root words). Using the terminology of the last section we can identify hyle with ME and morphe with TE. Thus, Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul (understood as hylomorphism) represents a unity of form and function within matter.

From the biological perspective, soul demarcates three sorts of living things: plants, animals, and human beings. In this way soul acts as the cause of a body’s being alive (De An 415b 8). This amalgamation (soul and body) exhibits itself through the presentation of a particular power that characterizes what it means to be alive for that sort of living thing.

The soul is the form of a living body thus constituting its first actuality. Together the body and soul form an amalgamation. This is because when we analyze the whole into its component parts the particular power of the amalgamation is lost. Matter without TE, as we have seen, acts through the nature of its elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and not for its organic purpose. An example that illustrates the relationship between form and matter is the human eye. When an eye is situated in a living body, the matter (and the motions of that matter) of the eye works with the other parts of the body to present the actualization of a particular power: sight. When governed by the actuality (or fulfillment) of its purpose, an eyeball can see (De An 412b 17). Both the matter of the eyeball and its various neural connections (hyle, understood as ME) along with the formal and final causes (morphe, understood as TE) are necessary for sight. Each part has its particular purpose, and that purpose is given through its contribution to the basic tasks associated with essence of the sort of thing in question: plant, animal, human.

It is important not to slip into the theological cum Cartesian sense of anima here. To say that plants and animals have souls is not to assert that there is a Divine rose garden or hound Heaven. We must remember that soul for Aristotle is a hylomorphic unity representing a monism and not a dualism. (The rational soul’s status is less clear since it is situated in no particular organ since Aristotle rejected the brain as the organ of thinking relegating it to a cooling mechanism, PA652b 21-25). It is the dynamic, vital organizing principle of life—nothing more, nothing less.

Plants exhibit the most basic power that living organisms possess: nutrition and reproduction (De An 414a 31). The purpose of a plant is to take in and process materials in such a way that the plant grows. Several consequences follow (for the most part) from an individual plant having a well-operating nutritive soul. Let’s examine one sort of plant, a tree. If a plant exhibits excellence in taking in and processing nutrition it will exhibit various positive effects. First, the tree will have tallness and girth that will see it through different weather conditions. Second, it will live longer. Third, it will drop lots of seeds giving rise to other trees. Thus, if we were to compare two individual trees (of the same species), and one was tall and robust while the other was small and thin, then we would be able to render a judgment about the two individual trees on the basis of their fulfillment of their purpose as plants within that species. The tall and robust tree of that species would be a better tree (functionally). The small and thin tree would be condemned as failing to fulfill its purpose as a plant within that species.

Animals contain the nutritive soul plus some of the following powers: appetite, sensation, and locomotion (De An 414a 30, 414b 1-415a 13). Now, not all animals have all the same powers. For example, some (like dogs) have a developed sense of smell, while others (like cats) have a developed ability to run quickly with balance. This makes simple comparisons between species more difficult, but within one species the same sort of analysis used with plants also holds. That is, between two individual dogs one dog can (for example) smell his prey up to 200 meters away while the other dog can only detect his prey up to 50 meters. (This assumes that being able to detect prey from a distance allows the individual to eat more often.) The first dog is better because he has fulfilled his soul’s function better than the second. The first dog is thus a good dog while the second a bad example of one. What is important here is that animals judged as animals must fulfill that power (soul) particular to it specifically in order to be functionally excellent. This means that dogs (for example) are proximately judged on their olfactory sense and remotely upon their ability to take in nutrition and to reproduce.

Humans contain the nutritive soul and the appetitive-sensory-locomotive souls along with the rational soul. This power is given in a passive, active, and imaginative sense (De An III 3-5). What this means is that first there is a power in the rational soul to perceive sensation and to process it in such a way that it is intelligible. Next, one is able to use the data received in the first step as material for analysis and reflection. This involves the active agency of the mind. Finally, the result (having both a sensory and ratiocinative element) can be arranged in a novel fashion so that the universal mixes with the perceived particular. This is imagination (De An III.3). For example, one might perceive in step-one that your door is hanging at a slant. In step-two you examine the hinges and ponder why the door is hanging in just this way. Finally, in step-three you consider types of solutions that might solve the problem—such as taking a plane to the top of the door, or inserting a “shim” behind one of the hinges. You make your decision about this door in front of you based upon your assessment of the various generic solutions.

The rational soul, thus understood as a multi-step imaginative process, gives rise to theoretical and practical knowledge that, in turn, have other sub-divisions (EN VI). Just as the single nutritive soul of plants was greatly complicated by the addition of souls for the animals, so also is the situation even more complicated with the addition of the rational soul for humans. This is because it has so many different applications. For example, one person may know right and wrong and can act on this knowledge and create habits of the same while another may have productive knowledge of an artist who is able to master the functional requirements of his craft in order to produce well-wrought artifacts. Just as it is hard to compare cats and dogs among animal souls, so it is difficult to judge various instantiations of excellence among human rational souls. However, it is clear that between two persons compared on their ethical virtues and two artists compared on their productive wisdom, we may make intra-category judgments about each. These sorts of judgments begin with a biological understanding of what it means to be a human being and how one may fulfill her biological function based on her possession of the human rational soul (understood in one of the sub-categories of reason). Again, a biological understanding of the soul has implications beyond the field of biology/psychology.

6. The Biological Practice: Outlines of a Systematics

Systematics is the study of how one ought to create a system of biological classification and thus perform taxonomy. (“Systematics” is not to be confused with being a “systematic philosopher.” The former term has a technical meaning related to the theoretical foundations of animal classification and taxonomy. The latter phrase has to do with a tightly structured interlocking philosophical account.) In Aristotle’s logical works, he creates a theory of definition. According to Aristotle, the best way to create a definition is to find the proximate group in which the type of thing resides. For example, humans are a type of thing (species) and their proximate group is animal (or blooded animal). The proximate group is called thegenus. Thus the genus is a larger group of which the species is merely one proper subset. What marks off that particular species as unique? This is the differentia or the essential defining trait. In our example with humans the differentia is “rationality.” Thus the definition of “human” is a rational animal. “Human” is the species, “animal” is the genus and “rationality” is the differentia.

In a similar way, Aristotle adapts his logical theory of genus and species to biology. By thinking in terms of species and their proximate genus, Aristotle makes a statement about the connections between various types of animals. Aristotle does not create a full-blown classification system that can describe all animals, but he does lay the theoretical foundations for such.

The first overarching categories are the blooded and the non-blooded animals. The animals covered by this distinction roughly correspond to the modern distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates. There are also two classes of dualizers that are animals that fit somewhat between categories. Here is a sketch of the categorization:

I. Blooded Animals

A. Live bearing animals

1. Homo Sapiens2. Other mammals without a distinction for primates

B. Egg-laying animals

1. Birds2. Fish

I. Non-Blooded Animals

A. Shell skinned sea animals: testaceaB. Soft shelled sea animals: Crustacea

C. Non-shelled soft skinned sea animals: Cephalopods

D. Insects

E. Bees

I. Dualizers (animals that share properties of more than one group)

A. Whales, seals and porpoises—they give live birth yet they live in the seaB. Bats—they have four appendages yet they fly

C. Sponges—they act like both plants and like animals

Aristotle’s proto-system of classification differs from that of his predecessors who used habitat and other non-functional criteria to classify animals. For example, one theory commonly set out three large groups: air, land, and sea creatures. Because of the functional orientation of Aristotle’s TE, Aristotle repudiates any classification system based upon non-functional accidents. What is important is that the primary activities of life are carried out efficiently through specially designated body parts.

Though Aristotle’s work on classification is by no means comprehensive (but is rather a series of reflections on how to create one), it is appropriate to describe it as meta-systematics. Such reflections are consistent with his other key explanatory concepts of functionalism (TE and ME) as well as his work on logic in the Organon with respect to the utilization of genus and species. Though incomplete, this again is a blueprint of how to construct a systematics. The general structure of meta-systematics also acts as an independent principle that permits Aristotle to examine animals together that are functionally similar. Such a move enhances the reliability of analogy as a tool of explanation.

7. “The more and the less” and “Epi to polu”

“The more and the less” is an explanatory concept that is allied to the ME account. Principally, it is a way that individuation occurs in the non-uniform parts. Aristotle distinguishes two sorts of parts in animals: the uniform and the non-uniform. The uniform parts are those that if you dumped them into a bucket and cut the bucket in half, they would still remain the same. For example, blood is a uniform part. Dump blood into a bucket and cut it in half and it’s still the same blood (just half the quantity). The same is true of tissue, cartilage, tendons, skin, et al. Non-uniform parts change when the bucket test is applied. If you dump a lung into a bucket and cut it in half, you no longer have a proper organ. The same holds true of other organs: heart, liver, pancreas, and so forth, as well as the skeleton (Uniform Parts—PA 646b 20, 648b, 650a 20, 650b, 651b 20, 652a 23; Non-Uniform Parts—PA 656b 25, 622a 17, 665b 20, 683a 20, 684a 25.)

When an individual has excess nutrition (trophe), the excess (perittoma) often is distributed all around (GA 734b 25). An external observer does not perceive the changes to the uniform parts—except, perhaps, stomach fat. But such an observer would perceive the difference in a child who has been well fed (whose non-uniform parts are bigger) than one who hasn’t. The difference is accounted for by the principle of the more and the less.

How does an external observer differentiate between any two people? The answer is that the non-uniform parts (particularly the skeletal structure) differ. Thus, one person’s nose is longer, another stands taller, a third is broader in the shoulders, etc. We all have noses, stand within a range of height and broadness of shoulders, etc. The particular mix that we each possess makes us individuals.

Sometimes, this mix goes beyond the range of the species (eidos). In these instances a part becomes non-functional because it has too much material or too little. Such situations are beyond the natural range one might expect within the species. Because of this, the instance involved is characterized as being unnatural (para phusin).

The possibility of unnatural events occurring in nature affects the status of explanatory principles in biology. We remember from above that there are two sorts of necessity: conditional and absolute. The absolute necessity never fails. It is the sort of necessity that one can apply to the stars that exist in the super lunar realm. One can create star charts of the heavens that will be accurate for a thousand years forward or backward. This is because of the mode of absolute necessity.

However, because conditional necessity depends upon its telos, and because of the principle of the more and the less that is non-teleologically (ME) driven, there can arise a sort of spontaneity (cf. automaton, Phys. II.6) that can alter the normal, expected execution of a task because spontaneity is purposeless. In these cases the input from the material cause is greater or lesser than is usually the case. The result is an unnatural outcome based upon the principle of the more and the less. An example of this might be obesity. Nourishment is delivered to the body in a hierarchical fashion beginning with the primary needs. When all biological needs are met, then the excess goes into hair, nails and body fat. Excess body fat can impair proper function, but not out of design.

Because of the possibility of spontaneity and its unintended consequences, the necessary operative in biological events (conditional necessity) is only “for the most part” (hôs epi to polu). We cannot expect biological explanatory principles to be of the same order as those of the stars. Ceteris paribis principles are the best the biological realm can give. This brute fact gives rise to a different set of epistemic expectations than are often raised in the Prior Analytics and the Posterior Analytics. Our expectations for biology are for general rules that are true in most cases but have many exceptions. This means that biology cannot be an exact science, unlike astronomy. If there are always going to be exceptions that are contrary to nature, then the biologist must do his biology with toleration for these sorts of peripheral anomalies. This disposition is characterized by the doctrine of epi to polu.

8. Significant Achievements and Mistakes

This section will highlight a few of Aristotle’s biological achievements from the perspective of over 2,300 years of hindsight. For simplicity’s sake let us break these up into “bad calls” (observations and conclusions that have proven to be wrong) and “good calls” (observations and conclusions that have proven to be very accurate).

We begin with the bad calls: let’s start with a few of Aristotle’s mistakes. First, Aristotle believed that thinking occurred in the region around the heart and not in the brain (a cooling organ, PA 652b 21-25, cf. HA 514a 16-22). Second, Aristotle thought that men were hotter than women (the opposite is the case). Third, Aristotle overweighed the male contribution in reproduction. Fourth, little details are often amiss such as the number of teeth in women. Fifth, Aristotle believed that spontaneous generation could occur. For example, Aristotle observed that from animal dung certain flies could appear (even though careful observation did not reveal any flies mating and laying their eggs in the dung. The possibility of the eggs already existing in the abdomen of the animal did not occur to Aristotle.) However, these sorts of mistakes are more often than not the result of an a priori principle such as “women being colder and less perfectly formed than men” or the application of his method on (in principle) unobservables—such as human conception in which it is posited that the male provides the efficient, formal, and final cause while the woman provides merely the material cause.

Good Calls: Aristotle examined over 500 different species of animals. Some species came from fishermen, hunters, farmers, and perhaps Alexander. Many other species were viewed in nature by Aristotle. There are some very exact observations made by Aristotle during his stay at Lesbos. It is virtually certain that his early dissection skills were utilized solely upon animals (due to the social prohibition on dissecting humans). One example of this comes from the Generation of Animals in which Aristotle breaks open fertilized chicken eggs at carefully controlled intervals to observe when visible organs were generated. The first organ Aristotle saw was the heart. (In fact it is the spinal cord and the beginnings of the nervous system, but this is not visible without employing modern staining techniques.) On eggs opened later, Aristotle saw other organs. This led Aristotle to come out against a popular theory of conception and development entitled, “the pre-formation theory.” In the pre-formation theory, whose advocates extended until the eighteenth century, all the parts appear all at once and development is merely the growth of these essential parts. The contrary theory that Aristotle espouses is the epigenetic theory. According to epigenesis, the parts are created in a nested hierarchical order. Thus, through his observation, Aristotle saw that the heart was formed first, then he postulated that other parts were formed (also backed-up by observation). Aristotle concludes,

I mean, for instance, not that the heart once formed, fashions the liver, and then the liver fashions something else; but that the one is formed after the other (just as man is formed in time after a child), not by it. The reason of this is that so far as the things formed by nature or by human art are concerned, the formation of that which is potentially brought about by that which is in actuality; so that the form of B would have to be contained in A, e.g., the form of liver would have to be in the heart—which is absurd. (GA 734a 28-35, Peck trans.)

In epigenesis the controlling process of development operates according to the TE plan of creating the most important parts first. Since the heart is the principle (arche) of the body, being the center of blood production and sensation/intelligence, it is appropriate that it should be created first. Then other parts such as the liver, etc. are then created in their appropriate order. The epigenesis-preformation debate lasted two thousand years and Aristotle got it right.

Another interesting observation by Aristotle is the discovery of the reproductive mode of the dog shark,Mustelus laevis (HA 6.10, 565b 1ff.). This species is externally viviparous (live bearing) yet internally oviparous (egg bearing). Such an observation could only have come from dissections and careful observations.

Another observation concerns the reproductive habits of cuttlefish. In this process of hectocotylization, the sperm of the Argonauta among other allied species comes in large spermataphores that the male transfers to the mantle cavity of the female. This complicated maneuver, described in HA 524a 4-5, 541b 9-15, cf. 544a 12, GA 720b 33, was not fully verified by moderns until 1959!

Though Aristotle’s observations on bees in HA seems to be entirely from the beekeeper’s point of view (HA 625b7-22), he does note that there are three classes of bees and that sexual reproduction requires that one class give way. He begins his discussion in the Generation of Animals with the following remark, “The generation of bees is beset with many problems” (GA 759a 9). If there are three classes and two genders, then something is amiss. Aristotle goes through what he feels to be all the possibilities. Though the observations are probably second-hand, Aristotle is still able to evaluate the data. He employs his systematic theory using the over-riding meta-principle that Nature always acts in an orderly way (GA 760a 32) to form his explanation of the function of each type of bee. This means that there must be a purposeful process (TE) that guides generation. However, since neither Aristotle nor the beekeepers had ever seen bee copulation, and since Aristotle allows for asexual generation in some fish, he believes that the case of bees offers him another case in which one class is sterile (complies with modern theory on worker bees), another class creates its own kind and another (this is meant to correspond to the Queen bee—that Aristotle calls a King Bee because it has a stinger and females in nature never have defensive weapons), while the third class creates not its own class but another (this is the drone).

Aristotle has got some of this right and some of it wrong. What he has right is first, bees are unusual in having three classes. Second, one class is infertile and works for the good of the whole. Third, one class (the Queen) is a super-reproducer. However, in the case of bees it is Aristotle’s method rather than his results that stirs admiration. Three meta-principles cause particular note:

Reproduction works with two groups not three. The quickest “solution” would have been to make one group sterile and then make the other two male and female. [This would have been the correct response.] However, since none of the beekeepers reported anything like reproductive behavior among bees and because Aristotle’s own limited observations also do not note this, he is reluctant to make such a reply. It is on the basis of the phainomena that Aristotle rejects bee copulation (GA 759a 10).
Aristotle holds that a priori argument alone is not enough. One must square the most likely explanation with the observed facts.
Via analogy, Aristotle notes that some fish seem not to reproduce and even some flies are generated spontaneously. Thus, assigning the roles to the various classes that he does, Aristotle does not create a sui generis instance. By analogy to other suppositions of his biological theory, Aristotle is able to “solve” a troublesome case via reference to analogy. (Aristotle is also admirably cautious about his own theory, saying that more work is needed.)

What is most important in Aristotle’s accomplishments is his combination of keen observations with a critical scientific method that employs his systematic categories to solve problems in biology and then link these to other issues in human life.

9. Conclusion

Since Aristotle’s biological works comprise almost a third of his writings that have come down to us, and since these writings may have occurred early in his career, it is very possible that the influence of the biological works upon Aristotle’s other writings is considerable. Aristotle’s biological works (so often neglected) should be brought to the fore, not only in the history of biology, but also as a way of understanding some of Aristotle’s non-biological writings.

10. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Text

Bekker, Immanuel (ed) update by Olof Gigon , Aristotelis Opera. Berlin, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1831-1870, rpt. W. de Gruyter, 1960-1987.

b. Key Texts in Translation

Barnes, Jonathan (ed). The Complete Works of Aristotle: the Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
The Clarendon Series of Aristotle:
Balme, David (tr and ed). Updated by Allan Gotthelf, De Partibus Animalium I with De Generatione Animalium I (with passages from II 1-3). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Lennox, James G. (tr and ed) Aristotle on the Parts of Animals I-4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
The Loeb Series of Aristotle (opposite pages of Greek and English).

c. Selected Secondary Sources

Balme, David. “Aristotle’s Use of Differentiae in Zoology.” Aristote et les Problèms de Méthode.Louvain: Publications Universitaires 1961.
Balme, David. “GENOS and EIDOS in Aristotle’s Biology” The Classical Quarterly. 12 (1962): 81-88.
Balme, David. “Aristotle’s Biology was not Essentialist” Archiv Für Geschichte der Philosophie. 62.1 (1980): 1-12.
Bourgey, Louis. Observation et Experiénce chez Aristote. Paris: J. Vrin, 1955.
Boylan, Michael. "Mechanism and Teleology in Aristotle's Biology" Apeiron 15.2 (1981): 96-102.
Boylan, Michael. "The Digestive and 'Circulatory' Systems in Aristotle's Biology" Journal of the History of Biology 15.1 (1982): 89-118.
Boylan, Michael. Method and Practice in Aristotle’s Biology. Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America, 1983.
Boylan, Michael. "The Hippocratic and Galenic Challenges to Aristotle's Conception Theory" Journal of the History of Biology 15.1 (1984): 83-112.
Boylan, Michael. "The Place of Nature in Aristotle's Biology" Apeiron 19.1 (1985).
Boylan, Michael. "Galen's Conception Theory" Journal of the History of Biology 19.1 (1986): 44-77.
Boylan, Michael. "Monadic and SystemicTEleology" in Modern Problems in Teleology ed. Nicholas Rescher (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1986).
Charles, David. Aristotle on Meaning and Essence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Deverreux, Daniel and Pierre Pellegrin. Eds. Biologie, Logique et Métaphysique chez Aristote. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,1990.
Düring, Ingemar. Aristotles De Partibus Animalium, Critical and Literary Commentary. Goeteborg, 1943, rpt. NY.: Garland, 1980.
Ferejohn, M. The Origins of Aristotelian Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox, eds. Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Grene, Marjorie. A Portrait of Aristotle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Joly, Robert. “La Charactérologie Antique Jusqu’ à Aristote. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire40 (1962): 5-28.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. Wissenscaft und Methode: Interpretationen zur Aristotelischen Theorie der Naturwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. Aristoteles und die moderne Wissenschaft Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1998.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. “Aristotles’ wissenschaftliche Methode in seinen zoologischen Schriften” in Wörhle, G., ed. Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften. Band 1 Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999, pp. 103-123.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. “Zoologische Sammelwerk in der Antike” in Wörhle, G., ed. Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften. Band 1 Stuttgart: F. Steiner 1999, pp. 181-198.
Kung, Joan. “Some Aspects of Form in Aristotle’s Biology” Nature and System 2 (1980): 67-90.
Kung, Joan. “Aristotle on Thises, Suches and the Third Man Argument” Phronesis 26 (1981): 207-247.
Le Blonde, Jean Marie. Aristote, Philosophie de la Vie. Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1945.
Lesher, James. “NOUS in the Parts of Animals.” Phronesis 18 (1973): 44-68.
Lennox, James. “Teleology, Chance, and Aristotle’s Theory of Spontaneous Generation” Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (1982): 219-232.
Lennox, James. “The Place of Mankind in Aristotle’s Zoology” Philosophical Topics 25.1 (1999): 1-16.
Lennox, James. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Sciences. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Lloyd, G.E.R. “Right and Left in Greek Philosophy” Journal of Hellenic Studies. 82 (1962): 67-90.
Lloyd, G.E.R. Polarity and Analogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Lloyd, G.E.R. Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Lloyd, G.E.R. “Saving the Appearances” Classical Quarterly. n.s. 28 (1978): 202-222.
Lloyd, G.E.R. Magic, Reason, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Lloyd, G.E.R. The Revolutions of Wisdom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987
Lloyd, G.E.R. Methods and Problems in Greek Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Lloyd, G.E.R. Aristotelian Explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Louis, Pierre. “La Génération Spontanée chez Aristote” Congrèss International d’Histoire des Sciences (1968): 291-305.
Louis, Pierre. La Découverte de la Vie. Paris: Hermann, 1975.
Owen, G.E.L. “TITHENAI TA PHAINOMENA” Aristote et les Problèms de Méthode. Louvain, 1975.
Owen, G.E.L. The Platonism of Aristotle. London: British Academy: Dawes Hicks Lecture on Philosophy, 1965.
Pellegrin, Pierre. La Classification des Animaux chez Aristote: Statut de la Biologie et Unite de l’Aristotélisme. Paris: Societé d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1982.
Pellegrin, Pierre. “Logical Difference and Biological Difference: The Unity of Aristotle’s Thought” in Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox, eds. Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 313-338.
Pellegrin, Pierre. “Taxonomie, moriologie, division” in Deverreux, Daniel and Pierre Pellegrin. Eds.Biologie, Logique et Métaphysique chez Aristote. Paris, 1990, 37-48.
Preus, Anthony. “Aristotle’s Parts of Animals 2.16 659b 13-19: Is it Authentic?” Classical Quarterly18.2 (1968): 170-178.
Preus, Anthony. “Nature Uses. . . .” Apeiron 3.2 (1969): 20-33.
Preus, Anthony. Science and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Biological Works. NY: Olhms, 1975.
Preus, Anthony. “Eidos as Norm” Nature and System 1 (1979): 79-103.
Solmsen, Friedrich. Aristotle’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with his Predecessors.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960.
Sorabji, Richard. Necessity, Cause, and Blame. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Thompson, D’Arcy. Aristotle as Biologist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.
Thompson, D’Arcy. Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917.
Ulmer, K. Wahrheit, Kunst und Natur bei Aristotles. Tübingen: M. Niemayer, 1953.
Witt, Charlotte. Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Wörhle, Georg and Jochen Althoff, eds. Biologie in Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften (series). Band 1 Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999.

Author Information

Michael Boylan
Email: michael.boylan@marymount.edu
Marymount University
U. S. A.

Aristotle: Biology

1. His Life

2. The Scope of Aristotle’s Biological Works

3. The Specialist and the Generalist

4. The Two Modes of Causal Explanation

5. Aristotle’s Theory of Soul

6. The Biological Practice: Outlines of a Systematics

I. Blooded Animals

A. Live bearing animals

1. Homo Sapiens2. Other mammals without a distinction for primates

B. Egg-laying animals

1. Birds2. Fish

I. Non-Blooded Animals

A. Shell skinned sea animals: testaceaB. Soft shelled sea animals: Crustacea

C. Non-shelled soft skinned sea animals: Cephalopods

D. Insects

E. Bees

I. Dualizers (animals that share properties of more than one group)

A. Whales, seals and porpoises—they give live birth yet they live in the seaB. Bats—they have four appendages yet they fly

C. Sponges—they act like both plants and like animals

7. “The more and the less” and “Epi to polu”

8. Significant Achievements and Mistakes

Reproduction works with two groups not three. The quickest “solution” would have been to make one group sterile and then make the other two male and female. [This would have been the correct response.] However, since none of the beekeepers reported anything like reproductive behavior among bees and because Aristotle’s own limited observations also do not note this, he is reluctant to make such a reply. It is on the basis of the phainomena that Aristotle rejects bee copulation (GA 759a 10).
Aristotle holds that a priori argument alone is not enough. One must square the most likely explanation with the observed facts.
Via analogy, Aristotle notes that some fish seem not to reproduce and even some flies are generated spontaneously. Thus, assigning the roles to the various classes that he does, Aristotle does not create a sui generis instance. By analogy to other suppositions of his biological theory, Aristotle is able to “solve” a troublesome case via reference to analogy. (Aristotle is also admirably cautious about his own theory, saying that more work is needed.)

9. Conclusion

10. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Text

Bekker, Immanuel (ed) update by Olof Gigon , Aristotelis Opera. Berlin, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1831-1870, rpt. W. de Gruyter, 1960-1987.

b. Key Texts in Translation

Barnes, Jonathan (ed). The Complete Works of Aristotle: the Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
The Clarendon Series of Aristotle:
Balme, David (tr and ed). Updated by Allan Gotthelf, De Partibus Animalium I with De Generatione Animalium I (with passages from II 1-3). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Lennox, James G. (tr and ed) Aristotle on the Parts of Animals I-4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
The Loeb Series of Aristotle (opposite pages of Greek and English).

c. Selected Secondary Sources

Balme, David. “Aristotle’s Use of Differentiae in Zoology.” Aristote et les Problèms de Méthode.Louvain: Publications Universitaires 1961.
Balme, David. “GENOS and EIDOS in Aristotle’s Biology” The Classical Quarterly. 12 (1962): 81-88.
Balme, David. “Aristotle’s Biology was not Essentialist” Archiv Für Geschichte der Philosophie. 62.1 (1980): 1-12.
Bourgey, Louis. Observation et Experiénce chez Aristote. Paris: J. Vrin, 1955.
Boylan, Michael. "Mechanism and Teleology in Aristotle's Biology" Apeiron 15.2 (1981): 96-102.
Boylan, Michael. "The Digestive and 'Circulatory' Systems in Aristotle's Biology" Journal of the History of Biology 15.1 (1982): 89-118.
Boylan, Michael. Method and Practice in Aristotle’s Biology. Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America, 1983.
Boylan, Michael. "The Hippocratic and Galenic Challenges to Aristotle's Conception Theory" Journal of the History of Biology 15.1 (1984): 83-112.
Boylan, Michael. "The Place of Nature in Aristotle's Biology" Apeiron 19.1 (1985).
Boylan, Michael. "Galen's Conception Theory" Journal of the History of Biology 19.1 (1986): 44-77.
Boylan, Michael. "Monadic and SystemicTEleology" in Modern Problems in Teleology ed. Nicholas Rescher (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1986).
Charles, David. Aristotle on Meaning and Essence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Deverreux, Daniel and Pierre Pellegrin. Eds. Biologie, Logique et Métaphysique chez Aristote. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,1990.
Düring, Ingemar. Aristotles De Partibus Animalium, Critical and Literary Commentary. Goeteborg, 1943, rpt. NY.: Garland, 1980.
Ferejohn, M. The Origins of Aristotelian Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox, eds. Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Grene, Marjorie. A Portrait of Aristotle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Joly, Robert. “La Charactérologie Antique Jusqu’ à Aristote. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire40 (1962): 5-28.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. Wissenscaft und Methode: Interpretationen zur Aristotelischen Theorie der Naturwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. Aristoteles und die moderne Wissenschaft Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1998.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. “Aristotles’ wissenschaftliche Methode in seinen zoologischen Schriften” in Wörhle, G., ed. Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften. Band 1 Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999, pp. 103-123.
Kullmann, Wolfgang. “Zoologische Sammelwerk in der Antike” in Wörhle, G., ed. Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften. Band 1 Stuttgart: F. Steiner 1999, pp. 181-198.
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Author Information

Michael Boylan
Email: michael.boylan@marymount.edu
Marymount University
U. S. A.

Aristotle: Ethics

Standard interpretations of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics usually maintain that Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) emphasizes the role of habit in conduct. It is commonly thought that virtues, according to Aristotle, are habits and that the good life is a life of mindless routine.

These interpretations of Aristotle’s ethics are the result of imprecise translations from the ancient Greek text. Aristotle uses the word hexis to denote moral virtue. But the word does not merely mean passive habituation. Rather, hexis is an active condition, a state in which something must actively hold itself.

Virtue, therefore, manifests itself in action. More explicitly, an action counts as virtuous, according to Aristotle, when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake. This stable equilibrium of the soul is what constitutes character.

Similarly, Aristotle’s concept of the mean is often misunderstood. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle repeatedly states that virtue is a mean. The mean is a state of clarification and apprehension in the midst of pleasures and pains that allows one to judge what seems most truly pleasant or painful. This active state of the soul is the condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work in concert. Achieving good character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul.

For Aristotle, moral virtue is the only practical road to effective action. What the person of good character loves with right desire and t.hinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful. Hence, the virtuous person sees truly and judges rightly, since beautiful things appear as they truly are only to a person of good character. It is only in the middle ground between habits of acting and principles of action that the soul can allow right desire and right reason to make their appearance, as the direct and natural response of a free human being to the sight of the beautiful.

1. Habit

In many discussions, the word "habit" is attached to the Ethics as though it were the answer to a multiple-choice question on a philosophy achievement test. Hobbes' Leviathan? Self-preservation. Descartes' Meditations? Mind-body problem. Aristotle's Ethics? Habit. A faculty seminar I attended a few years ago was mired in the opinion that Aristotle thinks the good life is one of mindless routine. More recently, I heard a lecture in which some very good things were said about Aristotle's discussion of choice, yet the speaker still criticized him for praising habit when so much that is important in life depends on openness and spontaneity. Can it really be that Aristotle thought life is lived best when thinking and choosing are eliminated?

On its face this belief makes no sense. It is partly a confusion between an effect and one of its causes. Aristotle says that, for the way our lives turn out, "it makes no small difference to be habituated this way or that way straight from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the difference." (1103b, 23-5) Is this not the same as saying those lives are nothing but collections of habits? If this is what sticks in your memory, and leads you to that conclusion, then the cure is easy, since habits are not the only effects of habituation, and a thing that makes all the difference is indispensable but not necessarily the only cause of what it produces.

We will work through this thought in a moment, but first we need to notice that another kind of influence may be at work when you recall what Aristotle says about habit, and another kind of medicine may be needed against it. Are you thinking that no matter how we analyze the effects of habituation, we will never get around the fact that Aristotle plainly says that virtues are habits? The reply to that difficulty is that he doesn't say that at all. He says that moral virtue is a hexis. Hippocrates Apostle, and others, translate hexis as habit, but that is not at all what it means. The trouble, as so often in these matters, is the intrusion of Latin. The Latin habitus is a perfectly good translation of the Greek hexis, but if that detour gets us to habit in English we have lost our way. In fact, a hexisis pretty much the opposite of a habit.

The word hexis becomes an issue in Plato's Theaetetus. Socrates makes the point that knowledge can never be a mere passive possession, stored in the memory the way birds can be put in cages. The word for that sort of possession, ktÎsis, is contrasted with hexis, the kind of having-and-holding that is never passive but always at work right now. Socrates thus suggests that, whatever knowledge is, it must have the character of a hexis in requiring the effort of concentrating or paying attention. A hexis is an active condition, a state in which something must actively hold itself, and that is what Aristotle says a moral virtue is.

Some translators make Aristotle say that virtue is a disposition, or a settled disposition. This is much better than calling it a "habit," but still sounds too passive to capture his meaning. In De Anima, when Aristotle speaks of the effect produced in us by an object of sense perception, he says this is not a disposition (diathesis) but a hexis. (417b, 15-17) His whole account of sensing and knowing depends on this notion that receptivity to what is outside us depends on an active effort to hold ourselves ready. In Book VII of the Physics, Aristotle says much the same thing about the way children start to learn: they are not changed, he says, nor are they trained or even acted upon in any way, but they themselves get straight into an active state when time or adults help them settle down out of their native condition of disorder and distraction. (247b, 17-248a, 6) Curtis Wilson once delivered a lecture at St. John's College, in which he asked his audience to imagine what it would be like if we had to teach children to speak by deliberately and explicitly imparting everything they had to do. We somehow set them free to speak, and give them a particular language to do it in, but they--Mr. Wilson called them "little geniuses"--they do all the work.

Everyone at St. John's has thought about the kind of learning that does not depend on the authority of the teacher and the memory of the learner. In the Meno it is called "recollection." Aristotle says that it is an active knowing that is always already at work in us. In Plato's image we draw knowledge up out of ourselves; in Aristotle's metaphor we settle down into knowing. In neither account is it possible for anyone to train us, as Gorgias has habituated Meno into the mannerisms of a knower. Habits can be strong but they never go deep. Authentic knowledge does engage the soul in its depths, and with this sort of knowing Aristotle links virtue. In the passage cited from Book VII of the Physics, he says that, like knowledge, virtues are not imposed on us as alterations of what we are; that would be, he says, like saying we alter a house when we put a roof on it. In the Categories, knowledge and virtue are the two examples he gives of what hexis means (8b, 29); there he says that these active states belong in the general class of dispositions, but are distinguished by being lasting and durable. The word "disposition" by itself he reserves for more passive states, easy to remove and change, such as heat, cold, and sickness.

In the Ethics, Aristotle identifies moral virtue as a hexis in Book II, chapter 4. He confirms this identity by reviewing the kinds of things that are in the soul, and eliminating the feelings and impulses to which we are passive and the capacities we have by nature, but he first discovers what sort of thing a virtue is by observing that the goodness is never in the action but only in the doer. This is an enormous claim that pervades the whole of the Ethics, and one that we need to stay attentive to. No action is good or just or courageous because of any quality in itself. Virtue manifests itself in action, Aristotle says, only when one acts while holding oneself in a certain way. This is where the word hexis comes into the account, from pÙs echÙn, the stance in which one holds oneself when acting. The indefinite adverb is immediately explained: an action counts as virtuous when and only when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake. I am translating as "in a stable equilibrium" the words bebaiÙs kai ametakinÍtÙs; the first of these adverbs means stably or after having taken a stand, while the second does not mean rigid or immovable, but in a condition from which one can't be moved all the way over into a different condition. It is not some inflexible adherence to rules or duty or precedent that is conveyed here, but something like a Newton's wheel weighted below the center, or one of those toys that pops back upright whenever a child knocks it over.

This stable equilibrium of the soul is what we mean by having character. It is not the result of what we call "conditioning." There is a story told about B. F. Skinner, the psychologist most associated with the idea of behavior modification, that a class of his once trained him to lecture always from one corner of the room, by smiling and nodding whenever he approached it, but frowning and faintly shaking their heads when he moved away from it. That is the way we acquire habits. We slip into them unawares, or let them be imposed on us, or even impose them on ourselves. A person with ever so many habits may still have no character. Habits make for repetitive and predictable behavior, but character gives moral equilibrium to a life. The difference is between a foolish consistency wholly confined to the level of acting, and a reliability in that part of us from which actions have their source. Different as they are, though, character and habit sound to us like things that are linked, and in Greek they differ only by the change of an epsilon to an eta, making Íthos from ethos

We are finally back to Aristotle's claim that character, Íthos, is produced by habit, ethos. It should now be clear though, that the habit cannot be any part of that character, and that we must try to understand how an active condition can arise as a consequence of a passive one, and why that active condition can only be attained if the passive one has come first. So far we have arranged three notions in a series, like rungs of a ladder: at the top are actives states, such as knowledge, the moral virtues, and the combination of virtues that makes up a character; the middle rung, the mere dispositions, we have mentioned only in passing to claim that they are too shallow and changeable to capture the meaning of virtue; the bottom rung is the place of the habits, and includes biting your nails, twisting your hair, saying "like" between every two words, and all such passive and mindless conditions. What we need to notice now is that there is yet another rung of the ladder below the habits.

We all start out life governed by desires and impulses. Unlike the habits, which are passive but lasting conditions, desires and impulses are passive and momentary, but they are very strong. Listen to a child who can't live without some object of appetite or greed, or who makes you think you are a murderer if you try to leave her alone in a dark room. How can such powerful influences be overcome? To expect a child to let go of the desire or fear that grips her may seem as hopeless as Aristotle's example of training a stone to fall upward, were it not for the fact that we all know that we have somehow, for the most part, broken the power of these tyrannical feelings. We don't expel them altogether, but we do get the upper hand; an adult who has temper tantrums like those of a two-year old has to live in an institution, and not in the adult world. But the impulses and desires don't weaken; it is rather the case that we get stronger.

Aristotle doesn't go into much detail about how this happens, except to say that we get the virtues by working at them: in the give-and-take with other people, some become just, others unjust; by acting in the face of frightening things and being habituated to be fearful or confident, some become brave and others cowardly; and some become moderate and gentle, others spoiled and bad-tempered, by turning around from one thing and toward another in the midst of desires and passions. (1103 b, 1422) He sums this up by saying that when we are at-work in a certain way, an active state results. This innocent sentence seems to me to be one of the lynch-pins that hold together the Ethics, the spot that marks the transition from the language of habit to the language appropriate to character. If you read the sentence in Greek, and have some experience of Aristotle's other writings, you will see how loaded it is, since it says that a hexis depends upon an energeia. The latter word, that can be translated as being-at-work, cannot mean mere behavior, however repetitive and constant it may be. It is this idea of being-at-work, which is central to all of Aristotle's thinking, that makes intelligible the transition out of childhood and into the moral stature that comes with character and virtue. (See Aristotle on Motion and its Place in Nature for as discussion energeia.)

The moral life can be confused with the habits approved by some society and imposed on its young. We at St. John's College still stand up at the beginning and end of Friday-night lectures because Stringfellow Barr -- one of the founders of the current curriculum -- always stood when anyone entered or left a room. What he considered good breeding is for us mere habit; that becomes obvious when some student who stood up at the beginning of a lecture occasionally gets bored and leaves in the middle of it. In such a case the politeness was just for show, and the rudeness is the truth. Why isn't all habituation of the young of this sort? When a parent makes a child repeatedly refrain from some desired thing, or remain in some frightening situation, the child is beginning to act as a moderate or brave person would act, but what is really going on within the child? I used to think that it must be the parent's approval that was becoming stronger than the child's own impulse, but I was persuaded by others in a study group that this alone would be of no lasting value, and would contribute nothing to the formation of an active state of character. What seems more likely is that parental training is needed only for its negative effect, as a way of neutralizing the irrational force of impulses and desires.

We all arrive on the scene already habituated, in the habit, that is, of yielding to impulses and desires, of instantly slackening the tension of pain or fear or unfulfilled desire in any way open to us, and all this has become automatic in us before thinking and choosing are available to us at all. This is a description of what is called "human nature," though in fact it precedes our access to our true natural state, and blocks that access. This is why Aristotle says that "the virtues come about in us neither by nature nor apart from nature" (1103a, 24-5). What we call "human nature," and some philosophers call the "state of nature," is both natural and unnatural; it is the passive part of our natures, passively reinforced by habit. Virtue has the aspect of a second nature, because it cannot develop first, nor by a continuous process out of our first condition. But it is only in the moral virtues that we possess our primary nature, that in which all our capacities can have their full development. The sign of what is natural, for Aristotle, is pleasure, but we have to know how to read the signs. Things pleasant by nature have no opposite pain and no excess, because they set us free to act simply as what we are (1154b, 15-21), and it is in this sense that Aristotle calls the life of virtue pleasant in its own right, in itself (1099a, 6-7, 16-17). A mere habit of acting contrary to our inclinations cannot be a virtue, by the infallible sign that we don't like it.

Our first or childish nature is never eradicated, though, and this is why Aristotle says that our nature is not simple, but also has in it something different that makes our happiness assailable from within, and makes us love change even when it is for the worse. (1154b, 21-32) But our souls are brought nearest to harmony and into the most durable pleasures only by the moral virtues. And the road to these virtues is nothing fancy, but is simply what all parents begin to do who withhold some desired thing from a child, or prevent it from running away from every irrational source of fear. They make the child act, without virtue, as though it had virtue. It is what Hamlet describes to his mother, during a time that is out of joint, when a son must try to train his parent (III, Ìv,181-9):

Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat
Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature...

Hamlet is talking to a middle-aged woman about lust, but the pattern applies just as well to five-year-olds and candy. We are in a position to see that it is not the stamp of nature that needs to be changed but the earliest stamp of habit. We can drop Hamlet's "almost" and rid his last quoted line of all paradox by seeing that the reason we need habit is to change the stamp of habit. A habit of yielding to impulse can be counteracted by an equal and opposite habit. This second habit is no virtue, but only a mindless inhibition, an automatic repressing of all impulses. Nor do the two opposite habits together produce virtue, but rather a state of neutrality. Something must step into the role previously played by habit, and Aristotle's use of the word energeia suggests that this happens on its own, with no need for anything new to be imposed. Habituation thus does not stifle nature, but rather lets nature make its appearance. The description from Book VII of the Physics of the way children begin to learn applies equally well to the way human character begins to be formed: we settle down, out of the turmoil of childishness, into what we are by nature.

We noticed earlier that habituation is not the end but the beginning of the progress toward virtue. The order of states of the soul given by Aristotle went from habit to being-at-work to the hexis or active state that can give the soul moral stature. If the human soul had no being-at-work, no inherent and indelible activity, there could be no such moral stature, but only customs. But early on, when first trying to give content to the idea of happiness, Aristotle asks if it would make sense to think that a carpenter or shoemaker has work to do, but a human being as such is inert. His reply, of course, is that nature has given us work to do, in default of which we are necessarily unhappy, and that work is to put into action the power of reason. (1097b, 24-1098a, 4) Note please that he does not say that everyone must be a philosopher, nor even that human life is constituted by the activity of reason, but that our work is to bring the power of logos forward into action. Later, Aristotle makes explicit that the irrational impulses are no less human than reasoning is. (1111 b, 1-2) His point is that, as human beings, our desires need not be mindless and random, but can be transformed by thinking into choices, that is desires informed by deliberation. (1113a, 11) The characteristic human way of being-at-work is the threefold activity of seeing an end, thinking about means to it, and choosing an action. Responsible human action depends upon the combining of all the powers of the soul: perception, imagination, reasoning, and desiring. These are all things that are at work in us all the time. Good parental training does not produce them, or mold them, or alter them, but sets them free to be effective in action. This is the way in which, according to Aristotle, despite the contributions of parents, society, and nature, we are the co-authors of the active states of our own souls (1114b, 23-4).

2. The Mean

Now this discussion has shown that habit does make all the difference to our lives without being the only thing shaping those lives and without being the final form they take. The same discussion also points to a way to make some sense of one of the things that has always puzzled me most in the Ethics, the insistence that moral virtue is always in its own nature a mean condition. Quantitative relations are so far from any serious human situation that they would seem to be present only incidentally or metaphorically, but Aristotle says that "by its thinghood and by the account that unfolds what it is for it to be, virtue is a mean." (1107a, 7-8) This invites such hopeless shallowness as in the following sentences from a recent article in the journal Ancient Philosophy (Vol. 8, pp. 101-4): "To illustrate ...0 marks the mean (e.g. Courage); ...Cowardice is -3 while Rashness is 3...In our number language...'Always try to lower the absolute value of your vice.' " This scholar thinks achieving courage is like tuning in a radio station on an analog dial. Those who do not sink this low might think instead that Aristotle is praising a kind of mediocrity, like that found in those who used to go to college to get "gentlemen's C's." But what sort of courage could be found in these timid souls, whose only aim in life is to blend so well into their social surroundings that virtue can never be chosen in preference to a fashionable vice? Aristotle points out twice that every moral virtue is an extreme (1107a, 8-9, 22-4), but he keeps that observation secondary to an over-riding sense in which it is a mean.

Could there be anything at all to the notion that we hone in on a virtue from two sides? There is a wonderful image of this sort of thing in the novel Nop's Trials by Donald McCaig. The protagonist is not a human being, but a border collie named Nop. The author describes the way the dog has to find the balance point, the exact distance behind a herd of sheep from which he can drive the whole herd forward in a coherent mass. When the dog is too close, the sheep panic and run off in all directions; when he is too far back, the sheep ignore him, and turn in all directions to graze. While in motion, a good working dog keeps adjusting his pace to maintain the exact mean position that keeps the sheep stepping lively in the direction he determines. Now working border collies are brave, tireless, and determined. They have been documented as running more than a hundred miles in a day, and they love their work. There is no question that they display virtue, but it is not human virtue and not even of the same form. Some human activities do require the long sustained tension a sheep dog is always holding on to, an active state stretched to the limit, constantly and anxiously kept in balance. Running on a tightrope might capture the same flavor. But constantly maintained anxiety is not the kind of stable equilibrium Aristotle attributes to the virtuous human soul.

I think we may have stumbled on the way that human virtue is a mean when we found that habits were necessary in order to counteract other habits. This does accord with the things Aristotle says about straightening warped boards, aiming away from the worse extreme, and being on guard against the seductions of pleasure. (1109a, 30- b9) The habit of abstinence from bodily pleasure is at the opposite extreme from the childish habit of yielding to every immediate desire. Alone, either of them is a vice, according to Aristotle. The glutton, the drunkard, the person enslaved to every sexual impulse obviously cannot ever be happy, but the opposite extremes, which Aristotle groups together as a kind of numbness or denial of the senses (1107b, 8), miss the proper relation to bodily pleasure on the other side. It may seem that temperance in relation to food, say, depends merely on determining how many ounces of chocolate mousse to eat. Aristotle's example of Milo the wrestler, who needs more food than the rest of us do to sustain him, seems to say this, but I think that misses the point. The example is given only to show that there is no single action that can be prescribed as right for every person and every circumstance, and it is not strictly analogous even to temperance with respect to food. What is at stake is not a correct quantity of food but a right relation to the pleasure that comes from eating.

Suppose you have carefully saved a bowl of chocolate mousse all day for your mid-evening snack, and just as you are ready to treat yourself, a friend arrives unexpectedly to visit. If you are a glutton, you might hide the mousse until the friend leaves, or gobble it down before you open the door. If you have the opposite vice, and have puritanically suppressed in yourself all indulgence in the pleasures of food, you probably won't have chocolate mousse or any other treat to offer your visitor. If the state of your soul is in the mean in these matters, you are neither enslaved to nor shut out from the pleasure of eating treats, and can enhance the visit of a friend by sharing them. What you are sharing is incidentally the 6 ounces of chocolate mousse; the point is that you are sharing the pleasure, which is not found on any scale of measurement. If the pleasures of the body master you, or if you have broken their power only by rooting them out, you have missed out on the natural role that such pleasures can play in life. In the mean between those two states, you are free to notice possibilities that serve good ends, and to act on them.

It is worth repeating that the mean is not the 3 ounces of mousse on which you settled, since if two friends had come to visit you would have been willing to eat 2 ounces. That would not have been a division of the food but a multiplication of the pleasure. What is enlightening about the example is how readily and how nearly universally we all see that sharing the treat is the right thing to do. This is a matter of immediate perception, but it is perception of a special kind, not that of any one of the five senses, Aristotle says, but the sort by which we perceive that a triangle is the last kind of figure into which a polygon can be divided. (1142a, 28-30) This is thoughtful and imaginative perceiving, but it has to be perceived. The childish sort of habit clouds our sight, but the liberating counter-habit clears that sight. This is why Aristotle says that the person of moral stature, the spoudaios, is the one to whom things appear as they truly are. (1113a, 30-1) Once the earliest habits are neutralized, our desires are disentangled from the pressure for immediate gratification, we are calm enough to think, and most important, we can see what is in front of us in all its possibility. The mean state here is not a point on a dial that we need to fiddle up and down; it is a clearing in the midst of pleasures and pains that lets us judge what seems most truly pleasant and painful.

Achieving temperance toward bodily pleasures is, by this account, finding a mean, but it is not a simple question of adjusting a single varying condition toward the more or the less. The person who is always fighting the same battle, always struggling like the sheep dog to maintain the balance point between too much and too little indulgence, does not, according to Aristotle, have the virtue of temperance, but is at best selfrestrained or continent. In that case, the reasoning part of the soul is keeping the impulses reined in. But those impulses can slip the reins and go their own way, as parts of the body do in people with certain disorders of the nerves. (1102b, 14-22) Control in self-restrained people is an anxious, unstable equilibrium that will lapse whenever vigilance is relaxed. It is the old story of the conflict between the head and the emotions, never resolved but subject to truces. A soul with separate, self-contained rational and irrational parts could never become one undivided human being, since the parties would always believe they had divergent interests, and could at best compromise. The virtuous soul, on the contrary, blends all its parts in the act of choice.

This is arguably the best way to understand the active state of the soul that constitutes moral virtue and forms character. It is the condition in which all the powers of the soul are at work together, making it possible for action to engage the whole human being. The work of achieving character is a process of clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way of the full efficacy of the soul. Someone who is partial to food or drink, or to running away from trouble or to looking for trouble, is a partial human being. Let the whole power of the soul have its influence, and the choices that result will have the characteristic look that we call "courage" or "temperance" or simply "virtue." Now this adjective "characteristic" comes from the Greek word charactÍr, which means the distinctive mark scratched or stamped on anything, and which is apparently never used in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the sense of character of which we are speaking, the word for which is Íthos, we see an outline of the human form itself. A person of character is someone you can count on, because there is a human nature in a deeper sense than that which refers to our early state of weakness. Someone with character has taken a stand in that fully mature nature, and cannot be moved all the way out of it.

But there is also such a thing as bad character, and this is what Aristotle means by vice, as distinct from bad habits or weakness. It is possible for someone with full responsibility and the free use of intellect to choose always to yield to bodily pleasure or to greed. Virtue is a mean, first because it can only emerge out of the stand-off between opposite habits, but second because it chooses to take its stand not in either of those habits but between them. In this middle region, thinking does come into play, but it is not correct to say that virtue takes its stand in principle; Aristotle makes clear that vice is a principled choice that following some extreme path toward or away from pleasure is right. (1146b, 22-3) Principles are wonderful things, but there are too many of them, and exclusive adherence to any one of them is always a vice.

In our earlier example, the true glutton would be someone who does not just have a bad habit of always indulging the desire for food, but someone who has chosen on principle that one ought always to yield to it. In Plato's Gorgias, Callicles argues just that, about food, drink, and sex. He is serious, even though he is young and still open to argument. But the only principled alternative he can conceive is the denial of the body, and the choice of a life fit only for stones or corpses. (492E) This is the way most attempts to be serious about right action go astray. What, for example, is the virtue of a seminar leader? Is it to ask appropriate questions but never state an opinion? Or is it to offer everything one has learned on the subject of discussion? What principle should rule?--that all learning must come from the learners, or that without prior instruction no useful learning can take place? Is there a hybrid principle? Or should one try to find the mid-way point between the opposite principles? Or is the virtue some third kind of thing altogether?

Just as habits of indulgence always stand opposed to habits of abstinence, so too does every principle of action have its opposite principle. If good habituation ensures that we are not swept away by our strongest impulses, and the exercise of intelligence ensures that we will see two worthy sides to every question about action, what governs the choice of the mean? Aristotle gives this answer: "such things are among particulars, and the judgment is in the act of sense-perception." (1109b, 23-4) But this is the calmly energetic, thought-laden perception to which we referred earlier. The origin of virtuous action is neither intellect nor appetite, but is variously described as intellect through-and-through infused with appetite, or appetite wholly infused with thinking, or appetite and reason joined for the sake of something; this unitary source is called by Aristotle simply anthropos. (1139a, 34, b, S-7) But our thinking must contribute right reason (ho orthos logos) and our appetites must contribute rightdesire (hÍ orthÍ orexis) if the action is to have moral stature. (1114b, 29, 1139a, 24-6, 31-2) What makes them right can only be the something for the sake of which they unite, and this is what is said to be accessible only to sense perception. This brings us to the third word we need to think about.

3. Noble

Aristotle says plainly and repeatedly what it is that moral virtue is for the sake of, but the translators are afraid to give it to you straight. Most of them say it is the noble. One of them says it is the fine. If these answers went past you without even registering, that is probably because they make so little sense. To us, the word "noble" probably connotes some sort of high-minded naiveté, something hopelessly impractical. But Aristotle considers moral virtue the only practical road to effective action. The word "fine" is of the same sort but worse, suggesting some flimsy artistic soul who couldn't endure rough treatment, while Aristotle describes moral virtue as the most stable and durable condition in which we can meet all obstacles. The word the translators are afraid of is to kalon, the beautiful. Aristotle singles out as the distinguishing mark of courage, for example, that it is always "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is the end of virtue." (111 S b, 12-13) Of magnificence, or large-scale philanthropy, he says it is "for the sake of the beautiful, for this is common to the virtues." (1122 b, 78) What the person of good character loves with right desire and thinks of as an end with right reason must first be perceived as beautiful.

The Loeb translator explains why he does not use the word "beautiful" in the Nicomachean Ethics. He tells us to kalon has two different uses, and refers both to "(1) bodies well shaped and works of art ...well made, and (2) actions well done." (p. 6) But we have already noticed that Aristotle says the judgment of what is morally right belongs to sense-perception. And he explicitly compares the well made work of art to an act that springs from moral virtue. Of the former, people say that it is not possible add anything to it or take anything from it, and Aristotle says that virtue differs from art in that respect only in being more precise and better. (1106b, 10-15) An action is right in the same way a painting might get everything just right. Antigone contemplates in her imagination the act of burying her brother, and says "it would be a beautiful thing to die doing this." (Antigone, line 72) This is called "courage." Neoptolemus stops Philoctetes from killing Odysseus with the bow he has just returned, and says "neither for me nor for you is this a beautiful thing." (Philoctetes, line 1304) This is a recognition that the rightness of returning the bow would be spoiled if it were used for revenge. This is not some special usage of the Greek language, but one that speaks to us directly, if the translators let it. And it is not a kind of language that belongs only to poetic tragedy, since the tragedians find their subjects by recognizing human virtue in circumstances that are most hostile to it.

In the most ordinary circumstances, any mother might say to a misbehaving child, in plain English, "don't be so ugly." And any of us, parent, friend, or grudging enemy, might on occasion say to someone else, "that was a beautiful thing you did." Is it by some wild coincidence that twentieth-century English and fourth-century BC Greek link the same pair of uses under one word? Aristotle is always alert to the natural way that important words have more than one meaning. The inquiry in his Metaphysics is built around the progressive narrowing of the word "being" until its primary meaning is discovered. In the Physics the various senses of motion and change are played on like the keyboard of a piano, and serve to uncover the double source of natural activity. The inquiry into ethics is not built in this fashion; Aristotle asks about the way the various meanings of the good are organized, but he immediately drops the question, as being more at home in another sort of philosophic inquiry. (1096b, 26-32) It is widely claimed that Aristotle says there is no good itself, or any other form at all of the sort spoken of in Plato's dialogues. This is a misreading of any text of Aristotle to which it is referred. Here in the study of ethics it is a failure to see that the idea of the good is not rejected simply, but only held off as a question that does not arise as first for us. Aristotle praises Plato for understanding that philosophy does not argue from first principles but toward them. (1095a, 31-3)

But while Aristotle does not make the meanings of the good an explicit theme that shapes his inquiry, he nevertheless does plainly lay out its three highest senses, and does narrow down the three into two and indirectly into one. He tells us there are three kinds of good toward which our choices look, the pleasant, the beautiful, and the beneficial or advantageous. (1104b, 31-2) The last of these is clearly subordinate to the other two, and when the same issue comes up next, it has dropped out of the list. The goods sought for their own sake are said to be of only two kinds, the pleasant and the beautiful. (1110b, 9-12) That the beautiful is the primary sense of the good is less obvious, both because the pleasant is itself resolved into a variety of senses, and because a whole side of virtue that we are not considering in this lecture aims at the true, but we can sketch out some ways in which the beautiful emerges as the end of human action.

Aristotle's first description of moral virtue required that the one acting choose an action knowingly, out of a stable equilibrium of the soul, and for its own sake. The knowing in question turned out to be perceiving things as they are, as a result of the habituation that clears our sight. The stability turned out to come from the active condition of all the powers of the soul, in the mean position opened up by that same habituation, since it neutralized an earlier, opposite, and passive habituation to self-indulgence. In the accounts of the particular moral virtues, an action's being chosen for its own sake is again and again specified as meaning chosen for no reason other than that it is beautiful. In Book III, chapter 8, Aristotle refuses to give the name courageous to anyone who acts bravely for the sake of honor, out of shame, from experience that the danger is not as great as it seems, out of spiritedness or anger or the desire for revenge, or from optimism or ignorance. Genuinely courageous action is in no obvious way pleasant, and is not chosen for that reason, but there is according to Aristotle a truer pleasure inherent in it. It doesn't need pleasure dangled in front of it as an extra added attraction. Lasting and satisfying pleasure never comes to those who seek pleasure, but only to the philokalos, who looks past pleasure to the beautiful. (1099a, 15-17, 13)

In our earlier example of temperance, I think most of us would readily agree that the one who had his eye only the chocolate mousse found less pleasure than the one who saw that it would be a better thing to share it. And Aristotle does say explicitly that the target the temperate person looks to is the beautiful. (1119b, 15-17) But since there are three primary moral virtues, courage, temperance, and justice, it is surprising that in the whole of Book V, which discusses justice, Aristotle never mentions the beautiful. It must somehow be applicable, since he says it is common to all the moral virtues, but in that case it would seem that the account of justice could not be complete if it is not connected to the beautiful. I think this does happen, but in an unexpected way.

Justice seems to be not only a moral virtue, but in some pre-eminent way the moral virtue. And Aristotle says that there is a sense of the word in which the one we call "just" is the person who has all moral virtue, insofar as it affects other people. (1129b, 26-7) In spite of all this, I believe that Aristotle treats justice as something inherently inadequate, a condition of the soul that cannot ever achieve the end at which it aims. Justice concerns itself with the right distribution of rewards and punishments within a community. This would seem to be the chief aim of the lawmakers, but Aristotle says that they do not take justice as seriously as friendship. They accord friendship a higher moral stature than justice. (1155a, 23-4) It seems to me now that Aristotle does too, and that the discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX replaces that of justice.

What is the purpose of reward and punishment? I take Aristotle's answer to be homonoia, the like-mindedness that allows a community to act in concord. For the sake of this end, he says, it is not good enough that people be just, while if they are friends they have no need to be just: (1155a, 24-9) So far, this sounds as though friendship is merely something advantageous for the social or political good, but Aristotle immediately adds that it is also beautiful. The whole account of friendship, you will recall, is structured around the threefold meaning of the good. Friendships are distinguished as being for use, for pleasure, or for love of the friend's character.

Repeatedly, after raising questions about the highest kind of friendship, Aristotle resolves them by looking to the beautiful: it is a beautiful thing to do favors for someone freely, without expecting a return (1163a, 1, 1168a, 10-13); even in cases of urgent necessity, when there is a choice about whom to benefit, one should first decide whether the scale tips toward the necessary or the beautiful thing (1165a, 4-5 ); to use money to support our parents is always more beautiful than to use it for ourselves (1165a, 22-4); someone who strives to achieve the beautiful in action would never be accused of being selfish (1168b, 25-8). These observations culminate in the claim that, "if all people competed for the beautiful, and strained to do the most beautiful things, everything people need in common, and the greatest good for each in particular, would be achieved ...for the person of moral stature will forego money, honor, and all the good things people fight over to achieve the beautiful for himself." (1169a, 8-11, 20-22) This does not mean that people can do without such things as money and honor, but that the distribution of such things takes care of itself when people take each other seriously and look to something higher.

The description of the role of the beautiful in moral virtue is most explicit in the discussion of courage, where the emphasis is on the great variety of things that resemble courage but fail to achieve it because they are not solely for the sake of the beautiful. That discussion is therefore mostly negative. We can now see that the discussion of justice was also of a negative character, since justice itself resembles the moral virtue called "friendship" without achieving it, again because it does not govern its action by looking to the beautiful. The discussion of friendship contains the largest collection of positive examples of actions that are beautiful. There is something of a tragic feeling to the account of courage, pointing to the extreme situation of war in which nothing might be left to choose but a beautiful death. But the account of friendship points to the healthy community, in which civil war and other conflicts are driven away by the choice of what is beautiful in life. (1155a, 24-7) By the end of the ninth book, there is no doubt that Aristotle does indeed believe in a primary sense of the good, at least in the human realm, and that the name of this highest good is the beautiful.

And it should be noticed that the beautiful is at work not only in the human realm. In De Anima, Aristotle argues that, while the soul moves itself in the act of choice, the ultimate source of its motion is the practical good toward which it looks, which causes motion while it is itself motionless. (433a, 29-30, b, 11-13) This structure of the motionless first mover is taken up in Book XII of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle argues that the order of the cosmos depends on such a source, which causes motion in the manner of something loved; he calls this source, as one of its names, "the beautiful," that which is beautiful not in seeming but in being. (1072a, 26-b, 4) Like Diotima in Plato's Symposium, Aristotle makes the beautiful the good itself.

A final word, on the fact that the beautiful in the Ethics is not an object of contemplation simply, but the source of action: In an article on the Poetics, I discussed the intimate connection of beauty with the experience of wonder. The sense of wonder seems to be the way of seeing which allows things to appear as what they are, since it holds off our tendencies to make things fit into theories or opinions we already hold, or use things for purposes that have nothing to do with them. But this is what Aristotle says repeatedly is the ultimate effect of moral virtue, that the one who has it sees truly and judges rightly, since only to someone of good character do the things that are beautiful appear as they truly are (1113 a, 29-35), that practical wisdom depends on moral virtue to make its aim right (1144a, 7-9), and that the eye of the soul that sees what is beautiful as the end or highest good of action gains its active state only with moral virtue (1144a, 26-33). It is only in the middle ground between habits of acting and between principles of action that the soul can allow right desire and right reason to make their appearance, as the direct and natural response of a free human being to the sight of the beautiful.

4. References and Further Reading

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 1999.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2002.
Aristotle, On the Soul, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 2001.
Aristotle, Poetics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2006.
Aristotle, Physics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Rutgers U. P., 1995.

Author Information

Joe Sachs
Email: joe.sachs@sjc.edu
St. John's College
U. S. A.

Aristotle: Logic

Aristotelian logic, after a great and early triumph, consolidated its position of influence to rule over the philosophical world throughout the Middle Ages up until the 19^th Century. All that changed in a hurry when modern logicians embraced a new kind of mathematical logic and pushed out what they regarded as the antiquated and clunky method of syllogisms. Although Aristotle’s very rich and expansive account of logic differs in key ways from modern approaches, it is more than a historical curiosity. It provides an alternative way of approaching logic and continues to provide critical insights into contemporary issues and concerns. The main thrust of this article is to explain Aristotle’s logical system as a whole while correcting some prominent misconceptions that persist in the popular understanding and even in some of the specialized literature. Before getting down to business, it is important to point out that Aristotle is a synoptic thinker with an over-arching theory that ties together all aspects and fields of philosophy. He does not view logic as a separate, self-sufficient subject-matter, to be considered in isolation from other aspects of disciplined inquiry. Although we cannot consider all the details of his encyclopedic approach, we can sketch out the larger picture in a way that illuminates the general thrust of his system. For the purposes of this entry, let us define logic as that field of inquiry which investigates how we reason correctly (and, by extension, how we reason incorrectly). Aristotle does not believe that the purpose of logic is to prove that human beings can have knowledge. (He dismisses excessive scepticism.) The aim of logic is the elaboration of a coherent system that allows us to investigate, classify, and evaluate good and bad forms of reasoning.

1. The Organon

To those used to the silver tones of an accomplished writer like Plato, Aristotle’s prose will seem, at first glance, a difficult read. What we have are largely notes, written at various points in his career, for different purposes, edited and cobbled together by later followers. The style of the resulting collection is often rambling, repetitious, obscure, and disjointed. There are many arcane, puzzling, and perhaps contradictory passages. This problem is compounded by the abstract, technical vocabulary logic sometimes requires and by the wide-ranging scope and the scattered nature of Aristotle’s observations. Some familiarity with Greek terminology is required if one hopes to capture the nuances in his thought. Classicists and scholars do argue, of course, about the precise Greek meaning of key words or phrases but many of these debates involve minor points of interpretation that cannot concern us here. Aristotle’s logical vocabulary needs to be understood within the larger context of his system as a whole. Many good translations of Aristotle are available. (Parenthetical citations below include the approximate Bekker number (the scholarly notation for referring to Aristotelian passages according to page, column, and line number of a standard edition), the English title of the work, and the name of the translator.)

Ancient commentators regarded logic as a widely-applicable instrument or method for careful thinking. They grouped Aristotle’s six logical treatises into a sort of manual they called the Organon (Greek for “tool”). The Organon included the Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations. These books touch on many issues: the logical structure of propositions, the proper structure of arguments (syllogisms), the difference between induction and deduction, the nature of scientific knowledge, basic fallacies (forms of specious reasoning), debating techniques, and so on. But we cannot confine our present investigations to the Organon. Aristotle comments on the principle of non-contradiction in the Metaphysics, on less rigorous forms of argument in the Rhetoric, on the intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics, on the difference between truth and falsity in On the Soul, and so on. We cannot overlook such important passages if we wish to gain an adequate understanding of Aristotelian logic.

2. Categories

The world, as Aristotle describes it in his Categories, is composed of substances—separate, individual things—to which various characterizations or properties can be ascribed. Each substance is a unified whole composed of interlocking parts. There are two kinds of substances. A primary substance is (in the simplest instance) an independent (or detachable) object, composed of matter, characterized by form. Individual living organisms—a man, a rainbow trout, an oak tree—provide the most unambiguous examples of primary substances. Secondary substances are the larger groups, the species or genera, to which these individual organisms belong. So man, horse, mammals, animals (and so on) would be examples of secondary substances. As we shall see, Aristotle’s logic is about correctly attributing specific properties to secondary substances (and therefore, indirectly, about attributing these properties to primary substances or individual things).

Aristotle elaborates a logic that is designed to describe what exists in the world. We may well wonder then, how many different ways can we describe something? In his Categories (4.1b25-2a4), Aristotle enumerates ten different ways of describing something. These categories (Greek=kategoria, deriving from the verb to indicate, signify) include (1) substance, (2) quantity, (3) quality, (4) relation, (5) where, (6) when, (7) being-in-a-position, (8) possessing, (9) doing or (10) undergoing something or being affected by something. In the Topics (I.9, 103b20-25), he includes the same list, replacing “substance” (ousia) with “essence” (ti esti). We can, along with Aristotle, give an example of each kind of description: (1) to designate something as a “horse” or a “man” is to identify it as a substance or to attribute an essence to it; (2) to say that the wall is four feet long is to describe it in terms of quantity; (3) to say that the roof is “white” is to ascribe a quality to it; (4) to say that your weight is “double” mine is to describe a relation between the two; (5) to say something happened in the market-place is to explain where; (6) to say it happened last year is to explain when; (7) to say an old man is sitting is to describe his position; (8) to say the girl has shoes on is to describe what she possesses; (9) to say the head chef is cutting a carrot with a knife is to describe what he is doing; and finally, (10) to say wood is being burned in the fireplace is to describe what it means for the wood to undergo burning or to be affected by fire. Commentators claim that these ten categories represent either different descriptions of being or different kinds of being. (To be a substance is to be in a certain way; to possess quantity is to be in a certain way; to possess a quality is to be in a certain way, and so on.) There is nothing magical about the number ten. Aristotle gives shorter lists elsewhere. (Compare Posterior Analytics, I.22.83a22-24, where he lists seven predications, for example). Whether Aristotle intends the longer lists as a complete enumeration of all conceivable types of descriptions is an open question. Scholars have noticed that the first category, substance or essence, seems to be fundamentally different than the others; it is what something is in the most complete and perfect way.

3. From Words into Propositions

Aristotle does not believe that all reasoning deals with words. (Moral decision-making is, for Aristotle, a form of reasoning that can occur without words.) Still, words are a good place to begin our study of his logic. Logic, as we now understand it, chiefly has to do with how we evaluate arguments. But arguments are made of statements, which are, in turn, made of words. In Aristotelian logic, the most basic statement is a proposition, a complete sentence that asserts something. (There are other kinds of sentences—prayers, questions, commands—that do not assert anything true or false about the world and which, therefore, exist outside the purview of logic.) A proposition is ideally composed of at least three words: a subject (a word naming a substance), a predicate (a word naming a property), and a connecting verb, what logicians call a copula (Latin, for “bond” or “connection”). Consider the simple statement: “Socrates is wise.” Socrates is the subject; the property of being wise is the predicate, and the verb “is” (the copula) links Socrates and wisdom together in a single affirmation. We can express all this symbolically as “S is P” where “S” stands for the subject “Socrates” and “P” stands for the predicate “being wise.” The sentence “Socrates is wise” (or symbolically, “S is P”) qualifies as a proposition; it is a statement that claims that something is true about the world. Paradigmatically, the subject would be a (secondary) substance (a natural division of primary substances) and the predicate would be a necessary or essential property as in: “birds are feathered,” or “triangles have interior angles equal to two right angles,” or “fire is upward-moving.” But any overly restrictive metaphysical idea about what terms in a proposition mean seems to unnecessarily restrict intelligent discourse. Suppose someone were to claim that “anger is unethical.” But anger is not a substance; it is a property of a substance (an organism). Still, it makes perfect sense to predicate properties of anger. We can say that anger is unethical, hard to control, an excess of passion, familiar enough, and so on. Aristotle himself exhibits some flexibility here. Still, there is something to Aristotle’s view that the closer a proposition is to the metaphysical structure of the world, the more it counts as knowledge. Aristotle has an all-embracing view of logic and yet believes that, what we could call “metaphysical correctness” produces a more rigorous, scientific form of logical expression.

Of course, it is not enough to produce propositions; what we are after is true propositions. Aristotle believes that only propositions are true or false. Truth or falsity (at least with respect to linguistic expression) is a matter of combining words into complete propositions that purport to assert something about the world. Individual words or incomplete phrases, considered by themselves, are neither true or false. To say, “Socrates,” or “jumping up and down,” or “brilliant red” is not to assert anything true or false about the world. It is to repeat words without making any claim about the way things are. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle provides his own definition of true and false: “to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”; and “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false.” (IV.7.1011b25, Ross.) In other words, a true proposition corresponds to way things are. But Aristotle is not proposing a correspondence theory of truth as an expert would understand it. He is operating at a more basic level. Consider the statement: “Spiders have eight legs.” (Symbolically, “All S is P,” where S, the subject, is “spiders”; P, the predicate, is “the state of being eight-legged,” and the verb “is” functions as the copula.) What does it mean to say that this claim is true? If we observe spiders to discover how many legs they have, we will find that (except in a few odd cases) spiders do have eight legs, so the proposition will be true because what it says matches reality. As we shall see, Aristotle’s logic is designed to produce just this kind of general statement.

4. Kinds of Propositions

Aristotle suggests that all propositions must either affirm or deny something. Every proposition must be either an affirmation or a negation; it cannot be both. He also points out that propositions can make claims about what necessarily is the case, about what possibly is the case, or even about what is impossible. His modal logic, which deals with these further qualifications about possibility or necessity, presents difficulties of interpretation. We will focus on his assertoric (or non-modal) logic here. Still, many of Aristotle’s points about necessity and possibility seem highly intuitive. In one famous example about a hypothetical sea battle, he observes that the necessary truth of a mere proposition does not trump the uncertainty of future events. Because it is necessarily true that there will be or will not be a sea battle tomorrow, we cannot conclude that either alternative is necessarily true. (De Interpretatione, 9.19a30ff.) So the necessity that attaches to the proposition “there will or will not be a sea battle tomorrow” does not transfer over to the claim ‘that there will be a sea battle tomorrow” or to the claim “there will not be a sea battle tomorrow.” Aristotle goes out of his way to emphasize the point that our personal beliefs about what will happen in the future do not determine whether the individual propositions are true. (Note that we must not confuse the necessary truth of a proposition with the necessity that precipitates the conclusion of a deductively-valid argument. The former is sometimes called “material,” “non-logical,” or “metaphysical” necessity; the later, “formal,” “deductive,” or “logical” necessity.” We discuss these issues further below.)

Aristotle claims that all propositions can be expressed using the “Subject copula Predicate” formula and that complex propositions are, on closer inspection, collections of simpler claims that display, in turn, this fundamental structure. Having fixed the proper logical form of a proposition, he goes on to classify different kinds of propositions. He begins by distinguishing between particular terms and universal terms. (The term he uses for “universal” is the Greek “katholou.”) Particular terms refer to individual things; universal terms refer to groups of things. The name “Socrates” is a particular term because it refers to a single human being; the word “spiders” is a universal term for it universally applies to all members of the group “spiders.” Aristotle realizes, of course, that universal terms may be used to refer to parts of a group as well as to entire groups. We may claim that all spiders have eight legs or that only some spiders have book-lungs. In the first case, a property, eight-leggedness, is predicated of the entire group referred to by the universal term; in the second case, the property of having book-lungs is predicated of only part of the group. So, to use Aristotelian language, one may predicate a property universally or not universally of the group referred to by a universal term.

This brings us to Aristotle’s classification of the four different kinds of categorical propositions (called “categorical propositions” because they assert a relationship between two categories or kinds). Each different categorical proposition possesses quantity insomuch as it represents a universal or a particular predication (referring to all or only some members of the subject class). It also possesses a definite quality (positive or negative) insomuch as it affirms or denies the specified predication. The adjectives “all,” “no,” and “some” (which is understood as meaning “at least one”) determine the quantity of the proposition; the quality is determined by whether the verb is in the affirmative or the negative. Rather than going into the details of Aristotle’s original texts, suffice it to say that contemporary logicians generally distinguish between four logical possibilities:

1. Universal Affirmation: All S are P (called A statements from the Latin, “AFFIRMO”: I affirm).

2. Universal Negation: No S are P (called E statements from “NEGO”: I deny).

3. Particular Affirmation: Some S are P (called I statements from AFFIRMO).

4. Particular Negation: Some S are not P (called O statements from NEGO).

Note that these four possibilities are not, in every instance, mutually exclusive. As mentioned above, particular statements using the modifier “some” refer to at least one member of a group. To say that “some S are P” is to say that “at least one S is P”; to say that “some S are not P” is to say that “at least one S is not P.” It must follow then (at least on Aristotle’s system) that universal statements require the corresponding particular statement. If “All S are P,” at least one S must be P; that is, the particular statement “Some S are P” must be true. Again, if “No S are P,” at least one S must not be P; that is, the particular statement “Some S are not P” must be true. (More on this, with qualifications, below.) Note also that Aristotle treats propositions with an individual subject such as “Socrates is wise” as universal propositions (as if the proposition was saying something like “all instances of Socrates” are wise.) One caveat: Although we cannot linger on further complications here, keep in mind that this is not the only way to divide up logical possibility.

5. Square of Opposition

Aristotle examines the way in which these four different categorical propositions are related to one another. His views have come down to us as “the square of opposition,” a mnemonic diagram that captures, systematizes, and slightly extends what Aristotle says in De Interpretatione. (Cf. 6.17a25ff.)

Figure 1

The Traditional Square of Opposition

As it turns out, we can use a square with crossed interior diagonals (Fig. 1 above) to identify four kinds of relationships that hold between different pairs of categorical propositions. Consider each relationship in turn.

1) Contradictory propositions possess opposite truth-values. In the diagram, they are linked by a diagonal line. If one of two contradictories is true, the other must be false, and vice versa. So the A proposition (All S are P) and the O proposition (Some S are not P) are contradictories. Clearly, if it is true that “all S are P,” then the O statement that “some S are not P” must be false. And if it is true that “some S are not P,” then the A statement that “all S are P” must be false. The same relationship holds between E (No S are P) and I (Some S are P) propositions. To use a simple example: If it is true that “all birds lay eggs,” then it must be false that “some birds do not lay eggs.” And if it is true that “some birds do not fly,” then it must be false that “all birds fly.”

2) Contrary propositions cannot both be true. The top horizontal line in the square joining the A proposition (All S are P) to the E proposition (No S are P) represents this logical relationship. Clearly, it cannot be true that “all S are P” and that “no S are P.” The truth of one of these contrary propositions excludes the truth of the other. It is possible, however, that both statements are false as in the case where some S are P and some (other) S are not P. So, for example, the statements “all politicians tell lies” and “no politicians tell lies” cannot both be true. They will, however, both be false if it is indeed the case that some politicians tell lies whereas some do not.

3) The relationship of subalternation results when the truth of a universal proposition, “the superaltern,” requires the truth of a second particular proposition, “the subaltern.” The vertical lines moving downward from the top to the bottom of the square in the diagram represent this condition. Clearly, if all members of an existent group possess (or do not possess) a specific characteristic, it must follow that any smaller subset of that group must possess (or not possess) that specific characteristic. If the A proposition (All S are P) is true, it must follow that the I proposition (“Some S are P”) must be true. Again, if the E proposition (No S are P) is true, it must follow that the O proposition (Some S are not P) must be true. Consider, for example, the statement, “all cheetahs are fast.” If every member of the whole group of cheetahs is fast, then it must be the case that at least one member of the group of cheetahs is fast; that is, the statement “some cheetahs are fast” must be true. And, to reformulate the same example as a negation, if it is true that “no cheetahs are slow,” then it must be the case that at least one member of the group of cheetahs is not slow; that is, the statement “some cheetahs are not slow” must be true.

Note that subalternation does not work in the opposite direction. If “Some S are P,” it need not follow that “All S are P.” And if “Some S are not P,” it need not follow that “No S are P.” We should also point out that if the subaltern is false, it must follow that the superaltern is false. If it is false to say that “Some S are P,” it must be false to say that “All S are P.” And if it is false to say that “Some S are not P,” it must be false to say that “No S are P.”

4) Subcontrary propositions cannot both be false. The bottom horizontal line in the square joining the I proposition (Some S are P) to the O proposition (Some S are not P) represents this kind of subcontrary relationship. Keeping to the assumptions implicit in Aristotle’s system, there are only three possibilities: (1) All S have property P; in which case, it must also be true (by subalternation) that “some S are P.” (2) No S have property P; in which case it must also be true (by subalternation) that “some S are not P.” (3) Some S have and some S do not have property P; in which case it will be true that “some S are P” and that “some S are not P.” It follows that at least one of a pair of subcontrary propositions must be true and that both will be true in cases where P is partially predicated of S. So, for example, both members of the subcontrary pair “some men have beards” and “some men do not have beards” are true. They are both true because having a beard is a contingent or variable male attribute. In contrast, only one member of the subcontrary pair “some snakes are legless” and “some snakes are not legless” is true. As all snakes are legless, the proposition “some snakes are not legless” must be false.

Traditional logicians, inspired by Aristotle’s wide-ranging comments, identified a series of “immediate inferences” as a way of deriving new propositions through a routine rearrangement of terms. Subalternation is an obvious example of immediate inference. From “All S are P” we can immediately infer—that is, without argument—that “some S are P.” They also recognized conversion, obversion, and contraposition as immediate inferences.

In conversion, one interchanges the S and P terms. If, for example, we know that “No S is P,” we can immediately infer that “No P is S.” (Once we know that “no circles are triangles,” we know right away that “no triangles are circles.”)

In obversion, one negates the predicate term while replacing it with the predicate term of opposite quality. If, for example, we know that “Some S are P,” we can immediately infer the obverse, “Some S are not non-P.” (Once we know that “some students are happy,” we know right away that “some students are not unhappy.”)

Finally, in contraposition, one negates both terms and reverses their order. If, for example, we know that “All S are P,” we can infer the contrapositive “All non-P are non-S.” (Once we know that “all voters are adults,” we know right away that “all children are unable to vote.”) More specific rules, restrictions, and details are readily available elsewhere.

6. Laws of Thought

During the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Century, scholars who saw themselves as carrying on the Aristotelian and Medieval tradition in logic, often pointed to the “laws of thought” as the basis of all logic. One still encounters this approach in textbook accounts of informal logic. The usual list of logical laws (or logical first principles) includes three axioms: the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of excluded middle. (Some authors include a law of sufficient reason, that every event or claim must have a sufficient reason or explanation, and so forth.) It would be a gross simplification to argue that these ideas derive exclusively from Aristotle or to suggest (as some authors seem to imply) that he self-consciously presented a theory uniquely derived from these three laws. The idea is rather that Aristotle’s theory presupposes these principles and/or that he discusses or alludes to them somewhere in his work. Traditional logicians did not regard them as abstruse or esoteric doctrines but as manifestly obvious principles that require assent for logical discourse to be possible.

The law of identity could be summarized as the patently unremarkable but seemingly inescapable notion that things must be, of course, identical with themselves. Expressed symbolically: “A is A,” where A is an individual, a species, or a genus. Although Aristotle never explicitly enunciates this law, he does observe, in the Metaphysics, that “the fact that a thing is itself is [the only] answer to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musician musical.” (VII.17.1041a16-18, Ross.) This suggests that he does accept, unsurprisingly, the perfectly obvious idea that things are themselves. If, however, identical things must possess identical attributes, this opens the door to various logical maneuvers. One can, for example, substitute equivalent terms for one another and, even more portentously, one can arrive at some conception of analogy and induction. Aristotle writes, “all water is said to be . . . the same as all water . . . because of a certain likeness.” (Topics, I.7.103a19-20, Pickard-Cambridge.) If water is water, then by the law of identity, anything we discover to be water must possess the same water-properties.

Aristotle provides several formulations of the law of non-contradiction, the idea that logically correct propositions cannot affirm and deny the same thing:

“It is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not be.” (Metaphysics, IV.3.1005b23-24, Ross.)

“The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.” (Ibid., IV.3.1005b19-20.)

“The most indisputable of all beliefs is that contradictory statements are not at the same time true.” (Ibid., IV.6.1011b13-14.)

Symbolically, the law of non-contradiction is sometimes represented as “not (A and not A).”

The law of excluded middle can be summarized as the idea that every proposition must be either true or false, not both and not neither. In Aristotle’s words, “It is necessary for the affirmation or the negation to be true or false.” (De Interpretatione, 9.18a28-29, Ackrill.) Symbolically, we can represent the law of excluded middle as an exclusive disjunction: “A is true or A is false,” where only one alternative holds. Because every proposition must be true or false, it does not follow, of course, that we can know if a particular proposition is true or false.

Despite perennial challenges to these so-called laws (by intuitionists, dialetheists, and others), Aristotelians inevitably claim that such counterarguments hinge on some unresolved ambiguity (equivocation), on a conflation of what we know with what is actually the case, on a false or static account of identity, or on some other failure to fully grasp the implications of what one is saying.

7. Existential Assumptions

Before we move on to consider Aristotle’s account of the syllogism, we need to clear up some widespread misconceptions and explain a few things about Aristotle’s project as a whole. Criticisms of Aristotle’s logic often assume that what Aristotle was trying to do coincides with the basic project of modern logic. Begin with the usual criticism brought against the traditional square of opposition. For reasons we will not explore, modern logicians assume that universal claims about non-existent objects (or empty sets) are true but that particular claims about them are false. On this reading, the claim that “all fairy-god mothers are beautiful” is true, whereas the claim that “some fairy-god mothers are beautiful” is false. Clearly, this clashes with the traditional square of opposition. By simple subalternation, the truth of the proposition “all fairy-god mothers are beautiful” requires the truth of the proposition “some fairy-god mothers are beautiful.” If the first claim is true, the second claim must also be true. For this and similar reasons, some modern logicians dismiss the traditional square as inadequate, claiming that Aristotle made a mistake or overlooked relevant issues. Aristotle, however, is involved in a specialized project. He elaborates an alternative logic, specifically adapted to the problems he is trying to solve.

Aristotle devises a companion-logic for science. He relegates fictions like fairy godmothers and mermaids and unicorns to the realms of poetry and literature. In his mind, they exist outside the ambit of science. This is why he leaves no room for such non-existent entities in his logic. This is a thoughtful choice, not an inadvertent omission. Technically, Aristotelian science is a search for definitions, where a definition is “a phrase signifying a thing’s essence.” (Topics, I.5.102a37, Pickard-Cambridge.) To possess an essence—is literally to possess a “what-it-is-to-be” something (to ti ēn einai). Because non-existent entities cannot be anything, they do not, in Aristotle’s mind, possess an essence. They cannot be defined. Aristotle makes this point explicitly in the Posterior Analytics. He points out that a definition of a goat-stag, a cross between a goat and a deer (the ancient equivalent of a unicorn), is impossible. He writes, “no one knows the nature of what does not exist—[we] can know the meaning of the phrase or name ‘goat-stag’ but not what the essential nature of a goat-stag is.” (II.7.92b6-8, Mure.) Because we cannot know what the essential nature of a goat-stag is—indeed, it has no essential nature—we cannot provide a proper definition of a goat-stag. So the study of goat-stags (or unicorns) is not open to scientific investigation. Aristotle sets about designing a logic that is intended to display relations between scientific propositions, where science is understood as a search for essential definitions. This is why he leaves no place for fictional entities like goat-stags (or unicorns). Hence, the assumed validity of a logical maneuver like subalternation.

8. Form versus Content

However, this is not the only way Aristotle’s approach parts ways with more modern assumptions. Some modern logicians might define logic as that philosophical inquiry which considers the form not the content of propositions. Aristotle’s logic is unapologetically metaphysical. We cannot properly understand what Aristotle is about by separating form from content. Suppose, for example, I was to claim that (1) all birds have feathers and (2) that everyone in the Tremblay family wears a red hat. These two claims possess the same very same propositional form, A. We can represent the first claim as: “All S are P,” where S=birds, and P=being feathered. And we can also represent the second claim as “All S are P,” where S=members of the Tremblay family, and P=wearing a red hat. Considered from an Aristotelian point of view, however, these two “All S are P” propositions possess a very different logical status. Aristotle would view the relationship between birds and feathers expressed in the first proposition as a necessary link, for it is of the essence of birds to be feathered. Something cannot be a bird and lack feathers. The link between membership in the Tremblay family and the practice of wearing a red hat described in the second proposition is, in sharp contrast, a contingent fact about the world. A member of the Tremblay family who wore a green hat would still be a member of the Tremblay family. The fact that the Tremblays only wear red hats (because it is presently the fashion in Quebec) is an accidental (or surface) feature of what a Tremblay is. So this second relationship holds in a much weaker sense. In Aristotle’s mind, this has important consequences not just for metaphysics, but for logic.

It is hard to capture in modern English the underlying metaphysical force in Aristotle’s categorical statements. In the Prior Analytics Aristotle renders the phrase “S is P” as “P belongs to S.” The sense of belonging here is crucial. Aristotle wants a logic that tells us what belongs to what. But there are different levels of belonging. My billfold belongs to me but this is a very tenuous sort of belonging. The way my billfold belongs to me pales in significance to, say, the way a bill belongs to a duck-billed platypus. It is not simply that the bill is physically attached to the platypus. Even if you were to cut off the bill of a platypus, this would just create a deformed platypus; it would not change the sense of necessary belonging that connects platypuses and bills. The deep nature of a platypus requires—it necessitates—a bill. In so much as logic is about discovering necessary relationships, it is not the mere arrangement of terms and symbols but their substantive meaning that is at issue.

As only one consequence of this “metaphysical attitude,” consider Aristotle’s attitude towards inductive generalizations. Aristotle would have no patience for the modern penchant for purely statistical interpretations of inductive generalizations. It is not the number of times something happens that matters. It is the deep nature of the thing that counts. If the wicked boy (or girl) next door pulls three legs off a spider, this is just happenstance. This five-legged spider does not (for Aristotle) present a serious counterexample to the claim that “all spiders are eight-legged.” The fact that someone can pull legs off a spider does not change the fact that there is a necessary connection between spiders and having eight legs. Aristotle is too keen a biologist not to recognize that there are accidents and monstrosities in the world, but the existence of these individual imperfections does not change the deep nature of things. Aristotle recognizes then that some types of belonging are more substantial—that is, more real—than others. But this has repercussions for the ways in which we evaluate arguments. In Aristotle’s mind, the strength of the logical connection that ties a conclusion to the premises in an argument depends, decisively, on the metaphysical status of the claims we are making. Another example may help. Suppose I were to argue, first: “Ostriches are birds; all birds have feathers, therefore, ostriches have feathers.” Then, second, “Hélène is the youngest daughter of the Tremblay family; all members of the Tremblay family wear red hats; therefore, Hélène wears a red hat.” These arguments possess the same form. (We will worry about formal details later.) But, to Aristotle’s way of thinking, the first argument is, logically, more rigorous than the second. Its conclusion follows from the essential and therefore necessary features of birds. In the second argument, the conclusion only follows from the contingent state of fashion in Quebec. In Aristotelian logic, the strength of an argument depends, in some important way, on metaphysical issues. We can’t simply say “All S are P; and so forth” and be done with it. We have to know what “S” and “P” stand for. This is very different than modern symbolic logic. Although Aristotle does use letters to take the place of variable terms in a logical relation, we should not be misled into thinking that the substantive content of what is being discussed does not matter.

9. The Syllogism

We are now in a position to consider Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism. Although one senses that Aristotle took great pride in these accomplishments, we could complain that the persistent focus on the mechanics of the valid syllogism has obscured his larger project. We will only cover the most basic points here, largely ignoring hypothetical syllogisms, modal syllogisms, extended syllogisms (sorites), inter alia. The syllogistic now taught in undergraduate philosophy departments represents a later development of Aristotle’s ideas, after they were reworked at the hands of Medieval and modern logicians. We will begin with a brief account of the way syllogisms are presented in modern logic and then move on to discussion of Aristotle’s somewhat different account.

We can define a syllogism, in relation to its logical form, as an argument made up of three categorical propositions, two premises (which set out the evidence), and a conclusion (that follows logically from the premises). In the standard account, the propositions are composed of three terms, a subject term, a predicate term, and a middle term: the subject term is the (grammatical) subject of the conclusion; the predicate term modifies the subject in the conclusion, and the middle term links the subject and predicate terms in the premises. The subject and predicate terms appear in different premises; the middle term appears once in each premise. The premise with the predicate term and the middle term is called the major premise; the premise with the subject term and the middle term is called the minor premise. Because syllogisms depend on the precise arrangement of terms, syllogistic logic is sometimes referred to as term logic. Most readers of this piece are already familiar with some version of a proverbial (non-Aristotelian) example: “All men are mortal; (all) Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are men; therefore, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are mortal.” If we symbolize the three terms in this syllogism such that Middle Term, M=man; Subject Term, S=Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; Predicate Term, P=mortal; we can represent the argument as: Major Premise: All M is P; Minor Premise: All S is M; Conclusion: So, All S is P. In the Middle Ages, scholars came up with Latin names for valid syllogisms, using vowels to represent the position of each categorical proposition. (Their list is readily available elsewhere.) The precise arrangement of propositions in this syllogism goes by the Latin moniker “Barbara” because the syllogism is composed of three A propositions: hence, BArbArA: AAA. A syllogism in Barbara is clearly valid where validity can be understood (in modern terms) as the requirement that if the premises of the argument are true, then the conclusion must be true. Modern textbook authors generally prove the validity of syllogisms in two ways. First, they use a number of different rules. For example: “when major and minor terms are universal in the conclusion they must be universal in the premises”; “if one premise is negative, the conclusion must be negative”; “the middle term in the premises must be distributed (include every member of a class) at least once,” and so on. Second, they use Venn diagrams, intersecting circles marked to indicate the extension (or range) of different terms, to determine if the information contained in the conclusion is also included in the premises.

Modern logicians, who still hold to traditional conventions, classify syllogisms according to figure and mood. The four figure classification derives from Aristotle; the mood classification, from Medieval logicians. One determines the figure of a syllogism by recording the positions the middle term takes in the two premises. So, for Barbara above, the figure is MP-SM, generally referred to as Figure 1. One determines the mood of a syllogism by recording the precise arrangement of categorical propositions. So, for Barbara, the mood is AAA. By tabulating figures and moods, we can make an inventory of valid syllogisms. (Medieval philosophers devised a mnemonic poem for such purposes that begins with the line “Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque priorisis.” Details can be found in many textbooks.) Although traditional classroom treatments prefer to stick to this time-honoured approach, Fred Sommers and George Englebretsen have devised a more up-to-date term logic that uses equations with “+” and “−” operators and is more attuned to natural language reasoning than the usual predicate logic. Turn then to a brief discussion of Aristotle’s own account of the syllogism.

As already mentioned, we need to distinguish between two kinds of necessity. Aristotle believes in metaphysical or natural necessity. Birds must have feathers because that is their nature. So the proposition “All birds have feathers” is necessarily true.” But Aristotle identifies the syllogistic form with the logical necessity that obtains when two separate propositions necessitate a third. He defines a sullogismos as “a discourse [logos] in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from them.” (Prior Analytics, I.1.24b18-20, Jenkinson.) The emphasis here is on the sense of inevitable consequence that precipitates a conclusion when certain forms of propositions are added together. Indeed, the original Greek term for syllogism is more rigorously translated as “deduction.” In the Prior Analytics, Aristotle’s method is exploratory. He searches for pairs of propositions that combine to produce a necessary conclusion. He begins by accepting that a few syllogisms are self-evidently (or transparently) true. Barbara, AAA-Fig.1, discussed above, is the best example of this kind of “perfect syllogism.” Another example of a perfect syllogism is Celarent: EAE-Fig.1. On seeing the arrangement of terms in such cases, one immediately understands that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. In the case of imperfect syllogisms Aristotle relies on a method of proof that translates them, step-by-step, into perfect syllogisms through a careful rearrangement of terms. He does this directly, through conversion, or indirectly, through the relationships of contradiction and contrariety outlined in the square of opposition. To cite only one very simple example, consider a brief passage in the Prior Analytics (I.5.27a5ff) where Aristotle demonstrates that the propositions “No P are M,” and “All S are M” can be combined to produce a syllogism with the conclusion, “No S are P.” If “No P are M,” it must follow that “No M are P” (conversion); but “No M are P” combined with the second premise, “All S are M” proves that “No S are P.” (This is to reduce the imperfect syllogism Cesare to the perfect syllogism Celarent.) This conversion of an imperfect syllogism into a perfect syllogism demonstrates that the original arrangement of terms is a genuine deduction. In other cases, Aristotle proves that particular arrangements of terms cannot yield proper syllogisms by showing that, in these instances, true premises lead to obviously false or contradictory conclusions. Alongside these proofs of logical necessity, Aristotle derives general rules for syllogisms, classifies them according to figure, and so on.

It is important to reiterate that Aristotelian syllogisms are not (primarily) about hypothetical sets, imaginary classes, or purely abstract mathematical entities. Aristotle believes there are natural groups in the world—species and genera—made up of individual members that share a similar nature, and hence similar properties. It is this sharing of individual things in a similar nature that makes universal statements possible. Once we have universal terms, we can make over-arching statements that, when combined, lead inescapably to specific results. In the most rigorous syllogistic, metaphysical necessity is added to logical necessity to produce an unassailable inference. Seen in this Aristotelian light, syllogisms can be construed as a vehicle for identifying the deep, immutable natures that make things what they are.

Medieval logicians summarized their understanding of the rationale underlying the syllogism in the so-called dictum de omni et nullo (the maxim of all and none), the principle that whatever is affirmed or denied of a whole must be affirmed or denied of a part (which they alleged derived from a reading of Prior Analytics I.1.24b27-30). Some contemporary authors have claimed that Aristotelian syllogistic is at least compatible with a deflationary theory of truth, the modern idea that truth-claims about propositions amount to little more than an assertion of the statement itself. (To say that “S is P” is true, is just to assert “S is P.”) Perhaps it would be better to say that one can trace the modern preoccupation with validity in formal logic to the distinction between issues of logical necessity and propositional truth implicit in Aristotle. In Aristotle’s logic, arguments do not take the form: “this state of affairs is true/false,” “this state of affairs is true/false,” therefore this state of affairs is true/false.” We do not argue “All S is M is true” but merely, “All S is M.” When it comes to determining validity—that is, when it comes to determining whether we have discovered a true syllogism—the question of the truth or falsity of propositions is pushed aside and attention is focused on an evaluation of the logical connection between premises and conclusion. Obviously, Aristotle recognizes that ascertaining the material truth of premises is an important part of argument evaluation, but he does not present a “truth-functional” logic. The concept of a “truth value” does not play any explicit role in his formal analysis the way it does, for example, with modern truth tables. Mostly, Aristotle wants to know what we can confidently conclude from two presumably true premises; that is, what kind of knowledge can be produced or demonstrated if two given premises are true.

10. Inductive Syllogism

Understanding what Aristotle means by inductive syllogism is a matter of serious scholarly dispute. Although there is only abbreviated textual evidence to go by, his account of inductive argument can be supplemented by his ampler account of its rhetorical analogues, argument from analogy and argument from example. What is clear is that Aristotle thinks of induction (epagoge) as a form of reasoning that begins in the sense perception of particulars and ends in a understanding that can be expressed in a universal proposition (or even a concept). We pick up mental momentum through a familiarity with particular cases that allows us to arrive at a general understanding of an entire species or genus. As we discuss below, there are indications that Aristotle views induction, in the first instance, as a manifestation of immediate understanding and not as an argument form. Nonetheless, in the Prior Analytics II.23 (and 24), he casts inductive reasoning in syllogistic form, illustrating the “syllogism that springs out of induction” (ho ex epagoges sullogismos) by an argument about the longevity of bileless animals.

Relying on old biological ideas, Aristotle argues that we can move from observations about the longevity of individual species of bileless animals (that is, animals with clean-blood) to the universal conclusion that bilelessness is a cause of longevity. His argument can be paraphrased in modern English: All men, horses, mules, and so forth, are long-lived; all men, horses, mules, and so forth, are bileless animals; therefore, all bileless animals are long-lived. Although this argument seems, by modern standards, invalid, Aristotle apparently claims that it is a valid deduction. (Remember that the word “syllogism” means “deduction,” so an “inductive syllogism” is, literally, an “inductive deduction.”) He uses a technical notion of “convertibility” to formally secure the validity of the argument. According to this logical rule, terms that cover the same range of cases (because they refer to the same nature) are interchangeable (antistrepho). They can be substituted for one another. Aristotle believes that because the logical terms “men, horses, mules, etc” and “bileless animals” refer to the same genus, they are convertible. If, however, we invert the terms in the proposition “all men, horses, mules, and so forth, are bileless animals” to “all bileless animals are men, horses, mules, and so forth,” we can then rephrase the original argument: All men, horses, mules, and so forth, are long-lived; all bileless animals are men, horses, mules, and so forth; therefore, all bileless animals are long-lived. This revised induction possesses an obviously valid form (Barbara, discussed above). Note that Aristotle does not view this inversion of terms as a formal gimmick or trick; he believes that it reflects something metaphysically true about shared natures in the world. (One could argue that inductive syllogism operates by means of the quantification of the predicate term as well as the subject term of a categorical proposition, but we will not investigate that issue here.)

These passages pose multiple problems of interpretation. We can only advance a general overview of the most important disagreements here. We might identify four different interpretations of Aristotle’s account of the inductive syllogism. (1) The fact that Aristotle seems to view this as a valid syllogism has led many commentators (such as Ross, McKirahan, Peters) to assume that he is referring to what is known as “perfect induction,” a generalization that is built up from a complete enumeration of particular cases. The main problem here is that it seems to involve a physical impossibility. No one could empirically inspect every bileless animal (and/or species) to ascertain that the connection between bilelessness and longevity obtains in every case. (2) Some commentators combine this first explanation with the further suggestion that the bileless example is a rare case and that Aristotle believes, in line with modern accounts, that most inductions only produce probable belief. (Cf. Govier’s claim that there is a “tradition going back to Aristotle, which maintains that there are . . . only two broad types of argument: deductive arguments which are conclusive, and inductive arguments, which are not.” (Problems in Argument Analysis, 52.)) One problem with such claims is that they overlook the clear distinction that Aristotle makes between rigorous inductions and rhetorical inductions (which we discuss below). (3) Some commentators claim that Aristotle (and the ancients generally) overlooked the inherent tenuousness of the inductive reasoning. On this account, Empiricists such as Locke and Hume discovered something seriously wrong about induction that escaped the notice of an ancient author like Aristotle. Philosophers in the modern Anglo-American tradition largely favor this interpretation. (Cf. Garrett’s and Barbanell’s insistence that “Hume was the first to raise skeptical doubts about inductive reasoning, leaving a puzzle as to why the concerns he highlighted had earlier been so completely overlooked.” (“Induction,” 172.) Such allegations do not depend, however, on any close reading of a wealth of relevant passages in the Aristotelian corpus and in ancient philosophy generally. (4) Finally, a minority contemporary view, growing in prominence, has argued that Aristotle did not conceive of induction as an enumerative process but as a matter of intelligent insight into natures. (Cf. McCaskey, Biondi, Rijk , Groarke.) On this account, Aristotle does not mean to suggest that inductive syllogism depends on an empirical inspection of every member of a group but on a universal act of understanding that operates through sense perception. Aristotelian induction can best be compared to modern notions of abduction or inference to the best explanation. This non-mathematical account has historical precedents in neo-Platonism, Thomism, Idealism, and in the textbook literature of traditionalist modern logicians that opposed the new formal logic. This view has been criticized, however, as a form of mere intuitionism dependent on an antiquated metaphysics.

The basic idea that induction is valid will raise eyebrows, no doubt. It is important to stave off some inevitable criticism before continuing. Modern accounts of induction, deriving, in large part, from Hume and Locke, display a mania for prediction. (Hence Hume’s question: how can we know that the future bread we eat will nourish us based on past experience of eating bread?) But this is not primarily how Aristotle views the problem. For Aristotle, induction is about understanding natural kinds. Once we comprehend the nature of something, we will, of course, be able to make predictions about its future properties, but understanding its nature is the key. In Aristotle’s mind, rigorous induction is valid because it picks out those necessary and essential traits that make something what it is. To use a very simple example, understanding that all spiders have eight legs—that is, that all undamaged spiders have eight legs—is a matter of knowing something deep about the biological nature that constitutes a spider. Something that does not have eight legs is not a spider. (Fruitful analogies might be drawn here to the notion of “a posteriori necessity” countenanced by contemporary logicians such as Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke or to the “revised” concept of a “natural kind” advanced by authors such as Hilary Kornblith or Brian Ellis.)

It is commonly said that Aristotle sees syllogisms as a device for explaining relationships between groups. This is, in the main, true. Still, there has to be some room for a consideration of individuals in logic if we hope to include induction as an essential aspect of reasoning. As Aristotle explains, induction begins in sense perception and sense perception only has individuals as its object. Some commentators would limit inductive syllogism to a movement from smaller groups (what Aristotle calls “primitive universals”) to larger groups, but one can only induce a generalization about a smaller group on the basis of a prior observation of individuals that compose that group. A close reading reveals that Aristotle himself mentions syllogisms dealing with individuals (about the moon, Topics, 78b4ff; about the wall, 78b13ff; about the eclipse, Posterior Analytics, 93a29ff, and so on.) If we treat individuals as universal terms or as representative of universal classes, this poses no problem for formal analysis. Collecting observations about one individual or about individuals who belong to a larger group can lead to an accurate generalization.

11. Deduction versus Induction

We cannot fully understand the nature or role of inductive syllogism in Aristotle without situating it with respect to ordinary, “deductive” syllogism. Aristotle’s distinction between deductive and inductive argument is not precisely equivalent to the modern distinction. Contemporary authors differentiate between deduction and induction in terms of validity. (A small group of informal logicians called “Deductivists” dispute this account.) According a well-worn formula, deductive arguments are valid; inductive arguments are invalid. The premises in a deductive argument guarantee the truth of the conclusion: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. The premises in an inductive argument provide some degree of support for the conclusion, but it is possible to have true premises and a false conclusion. Although some commentators attribute such views to Aristotle, this distinction between strict logical necessity and merely probable or plausible reasoning more easily maps onto the distinction Aristotle makes between scientific and rhetorical reasoning (both of which we discuss below). Aristotle views inductive syllogism as scientific (as opposed to rhetorical) induction and therefore as a more rigorous form of inductive argument.

We can best understand what this amounts to by a careful comparison of a deductive and an inductive syllogism on the same topic. If we reconstruct, along Aristotelian lines, a deduction on the longevity of bileless animals, the argument would presumably run: All bileless animals are long-lived; all men, horses, mules, and so forth, are bileless animals; therefore, all men, horses, mules, and so forth, are long-lived. Defining the terms in this syllogism as: Subject Term, S=men, horses, mules, and so forth; Predicate Term, P=long-lived animals; Middle Term, M=bileless animals, we can represent this metaphysically correct inference as: Major Premise: All M are P. Minor Premise: All S are M. Conclusion: Therefore all S are P. (Barbara.) As we already have seen, the corresponding induction runs: All men, horses, mules, and so forth, are long-lived; all men, horses, mules, and so forth, are bileless animals; therefore, all bileless animals are long-lived. Using the same definition of terms, we are left with: Major Premise: All S are P. Minor Premise: All S are M (convertible to All M are S). Conclusion: Therefore, all M are P. (Converted to Barbara.) The difference between these two inferences is the difference between deductive and inductive argument in Aristotle.

Clearly, Aristotelian and modern treatments of these issues diverge. As we have already indicated, in the modern formalism, one automatically defines subject, predicate, and middle terms of a syllogism according to their placement in the argument. For Aristotle, the terms in a rigorous syllogism have a metaphysical significance as well. In our correctly formulated deductive-inductive pair, S represents individual species and/or the individuals that make up those species (men, horses, mules, and so forth); M represents the deep nature of these things (bilelessness), and P represents the property that necessarily attaches to that nature (longevity). Here then is the fundamental difference between Aristotelian deduction and induction in a nutshell. In deduction, we prove that a property (P) belongs to individual species (S) because it possesses a certain nature (M); in induction, we prove that a property (P) belongs to a nature (M) because it belongs to individual species (S). Expressed formally, deduction proves that the subject term (S) is associated with a predicate term (P) by means of the middle term (M); induction proves that the middle term (M) is associated with the predicate term (P) by means of the subject term (S). (Cf. Prior Analytics, II.23.68b31-35.) Aristotle does not claim that inductive syllogism is invalid but that the terms in an induction have been rearranged. In deduction, the middle term joins the two extremes (the subject and predicate terms); in induction, one extreme, the subject term, acts as the middle term, joining the true middle term with the other extreme. This is what Aristotle means when he maintains that in induction one uses a subject term to argue to a middle term. Formally, with respect to the arrangement of terms, the subject term becomes the “middle term” in the argument.

Aristotle distinguishes then between induction and deduction in three different ways. First, induction moves from particulars to a universal, whereas deduction moves from a universal to particulars. The bileless induction moves from particular species to a universal nature; the bileless deduction moves from a universal nature to particular species. Second, induction moves from observation to language (that is, from sense perception to propositions), whereas deduction moves from language to language (from propositions to a new proposition). The bileless induction is really a way of demonstrating how observations of bileless animals lead to (propositional) knowledge about longevity; the bileless deduction demonstrates how (propositional) knowledge of a universal nature leads (propositional) knowledge about particular species. Third, induction identifies or explains a nature, whereas deduction applies or demonstrates a nature. The bileless induction provides an explanation of the nature of particular species: it is of the nature of bileless organisms to possess a long life. The bileless deduction applies that finding to particular species; once we know that it is of the nature of bileless organisms to possess a long life, we can demonstrate or put on display the property of longevity as it pertains to particular species.

One final point needs clarification. The logical form of the inductive syllogism, after the convertibility maneuver, is the same as the deductive syllogism. In this sense, induction and deduction possess the same (final) logical form. But, of course, in order to successfully perform an induction, one has to know that convertibility is possible, and this requires an act of intelligence which is able to discern the metaphysical realities between things out in the world. We discuss this issue under non-discursive reasoning below.

12. Science

Aristotle wants to construct a logic that provides a working language for rigorous science as he understands it. Whereas we have been talking of syllogisms as arguments, Aristotelian science is about explanation. Admittedly, informal logicians generally distinguish between explanation and argument. An argument is intended to persuade about a debatable point; an explanation is not intended to persuade so much as to promote understanding. Aristotle views science as involving logical inferences that move beyond what is disputable to a consideration of what is the case. Still, the “explanatory” syllogisms used in science possess precisely the same formal structures as “argumentative” syllogisms. So we might consider them arguments in a wider sense. For his part, Aristotle relegates eristic reason to the broad field of rhetoric. He views science, perhaps naively, as a domain of established fact. The syllogisms used in science are about establishing an explanation from specific cases (induction) and then applying or illustrating this explanation to specific cases (deduction).

The ancient Greek term for science, “episteme,” is not precisely equivalent to its modern counterpart. In Aristotle’s worldview, science, as the most rigorous sort of discursive knowledge, is opposed to mere opinion (doxa); it is about what is universal and necessary as opposed to what is particular and contingent, and it is theoretical as opposed to practical. Aristotle believes that knowledge, understood as justified true belief, is most perfectly expressed in a scientific demonstration (apodeixis), also known as an apodeitic or scientific syllogism. He posits a number of specific requirements for this most rigorous of all deductions. In order to qualify as a scientific demonstration, a syllogism must possess premises that are “true, primary, immediate, better known than, prior to, and causative of the conclusion.” (Posterior Analytics, I.2.71b20ff, Tredennick.) It must yield information about a natural kind or a group of individual things. And it must produce universal knowledge (episteme). Specialists have disputed the meaning of these individual requirements, but the main message is clear. Aristotle accepts, as a general rule, that a conclusion in an argument cannot be more authoritative than the premises that led to that conclusion. We cannot derive better (or more reliable) knowledge from worse (or less reliable) knowledge. Given that a scientific demonstration is the most rigorous form of knowledge possible, we must start with premises that are utterly basic and as certain as possible, which are “immediately” induced from observation, and which confirm to the necessary structure of the world in a way that is authoritative and absolutely incontrovertible. This requires a reliance on first principles which we discuss below.

In the best case scenario, Aristotelian science is about finding definitions of species that, according to a somewhat bald formula, identify the genus (the larger natural group) and the differentia (that unique feature that sets the species apart from the larger group). As Aristotle’s focus on definitions is a bit cramped and less than consistent (he himself spends a great deal of time talking about necessary rather than essential properties), let us broaden his approach to science to focus on ostensible definitions, where an ostensible definition is either a rigorous definition or, more broadly, any properly-formulated phrase that identifies the unique properties of something. On this looser approach, which is more consistent with Aristotle’s actual practice, to define an entity is to identify the nature, the essential and necessary properties, that make it uniquely what it is. Suffice it to say that Aristotle’s idealized account of what science entails needs to be expanded to cover a wide range of activities and that fall under what is now known as scientific practice. What follows is a general sketch of his overall orientation. (We should point out that Aristotle himself resorts to whatever informal methods seem appropriate when reporting on his own biological investigations without too much concern for any fixed ideal of formal correctness. He makes no attempt to cast his own scientific conclusions in metaphysically-correct syllogisms. One could perhaps insist that he uses enthymemes (syllogisms with unstated premises), but mostly, he just seems to record what seems appropriate without any deliberate attempt at correct formalization. Note that most of Aristotle’s scientific work is “historia,” an earlier stage of observing, fact-collecting, and opinion-reporting that proceeds the principled theorizing of advanced science.)

For Aristotle, even theology is a science insomuch as it deals with universal and necessary principles. Still, in line with modern attitudes (and in opposition to Plato), Aristotle views sense-perception as the proper route to scientific knowledge. Our empirical experience of the world yields knowledge through induction. Aristotle elaborates then an inductive-deductive model of science. Through careful observation of particular species, the scientist induces an ostensible definition to explain a nature and then demonstrates the consequences of that nature for particular species. Consider a specific case. In the Posterior Analytics (II.16-17.98b32ff, 99a24ff), Aristotle mentions an explanation about why deciduous plants lose their leaves in the winter. The ancients apparently believed this happens because sap coagulates at the base of the leaf (which is not entirely off the mark). We can use this ancient example of a botanical explanation to illustrate how the business of Aristotelian science is supposed to operate. Suppose we are a group of ancient botanists who discover, through empirical inspection, why deciduous plants such as vines and figs lose their leaves. Following Aristotle's lead, we can cast our discovery in the form of the following inductive syllogism: “Vine, fig, and so forth, are deciduous. Vine, fig, and so forth, coagulate sap. Therefore, all sap-coagulators are deciduous.” This induction produces the definition of “deciduous.” (“Deciduous” is the definiendum; sap-coagulation, the definiens; the point being that everything that is a sap-coagulator is deciduous, which might not be the case if we turned it around and said “All deciduous plants are sap-coagulators.”) But once we have a definition of “deciduous,” we can use it as the first premise in a deduction to demonstrate something about say, the genus “broad-leaved trees.” We can apply, in other words, what we have learned about deciduous plants in general to the more specific genus of broad-leaved trees. Our deduction will read: “All sap-coagulators are deciduous. All broad-leaved trees are sap-coagulators. Therefore, all broad-leaved trees are deciduous.” We can express all this symbolically. For the induction, where S=vine, fig, and so forth, P=deciduous, M= being a sap-coagulator, the argument is: “All S is P; all S is M (convertible to all M is S); therefore, all M are P (converted to Barbara). For the deduction, where S=broad-leafed trees, M=being a sap-coagulator, P=deciduous, the argument can be represented: “All M are P; all S is M; therefore, all S is P” (Barbara). This is then the basic logic of Aristotelian science.

A simple diagram of how science operates follows (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The Inductive-Deductive Method of Aristotelian Science

Aristotle views science as a search for causes (aitia). In a well-known example about planets not twinkling because they are close to the earth (Posterior Analytics, I.13), he makes an important distinction between knowledge of the fact and knowledge of the reasoned fact. The rigorous scientist aims at knowledge of the reasoned fact which explains why something is the way it is. In our example, sap-coagulation is the cause of deciduous; deciduous is not the cause of sap-coagulation. That is why “sap-coagulation” is featured here as the middle term, because it is the cause of the phenomenon being investigated. The deduction “All sap-coagulators are deciduous; all broad-leaved trees are sap-coagulators; therefore, all broad-leaved trees are deciduous” counts as knowledge of the reasoned fact because it reveals the cause of broad-leafed deciduousness.

Aristotle makes a further distinction between what is more knowable relative to us and what is more knowable by nature (or in itself). He remarks in the Physics, “The natural way of [inquiry] is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not ‘knowable relatively to us’ and ‘knowable’ without qualification.” (I.184a15, Hardie, Gaye.) In science we generally move from the effect to the cause, from what we see and observe around us to the hidden origins of things. The outward manifestation of the phenomenon of “deciduousness” is more accessible to us because we can see the trees shedding their leaves, but sap-coagulation as an explanatory principle is more knowable in itself because it embodies the cause. To know about sap-coagulation counts as an advance in knowledge; someone who knows this knows more than someone who only knows that trees shed their leaves in the fall. Aristotle believes that the job of science is to put on display what best counts as knowledge, even if the resulting theory strays from our immediate perceptions and first concerns.

Jan Lukasiewicz, a modern-day pioneer in term logic, comments that “some queer philosophical prejudices which cannot be explained rationally” made early commentators claim that the major premise in a syllogism (the one with the middle and predicate terms) must be first. (Aristotle’s Syllogistic, 32.) But once we view the syllogism within the larger context of Aristotelian logic, it becomes perfectly obvious why these early commentators put the major premise first: because it constitutes the (ostensible) definition; because it contains an explanation of the nature of the thing upon which everything else depends. The major premise in a scientific deduction is the most important part of the syllogism; it is scientifically prior in that it reveals the cause that motivates the phenomenon. So it makes sense to place it first. This was not an irrational prejudice.

13. Non-Discursive Reasoning

The distinction Aristotle draws between discursive knowledge (that is, knowledge through argument) and non-discursive knowledge (that is, knowledge through nous) is akin to the medieval distinction between ratio (argument) and intellectus (direct intellection). In Aristotelian logic, non-discursive knowledge comes first and provides the starting points upon which discursive or argumentative knowledge depends. It is hard to know what to call the mental power that gives rise to this type of knowledge in English. The traditional term “intuition” invites misunderstanding. When Aristotle claims that there is an immediate sort of knowledge that comes directly from the mind (nous) without discursive argument, he is not suggesting that knowledge can be accessed through vague feelings or hunches. He is referring to a capacity for intelligent appraisal that might be better described as discernment, comprehension, or insight. Like his later medieval followers, he views “intuition” as a species of reason; it is not prior to reason or outside of reason, it is—in the highest degree—the activity of reason itself. (Cf. Posterior Analytics, II. 19; Nicomachean Ethics, IV.6.)

For Aristotle, science is only one manifestation of human intelligence. He includes, for example, intuition, craft, philosophical wisdom, and moral decision-making along with science in his account of the five intellectual virtues. (Nicomachean Ethics, VI.3-8.) When it comes to knowledge-acquisition, however, intuition is primary. It includes the most basic operations of intelligence, providing the ultimate ground of understanding and inference upon which everything else depends. Aristotle is a firm empiricist. He believes that knowledge begins in perception, but he also believes that we need intuition to make sense of perception. In the Posterior Analytics (II.19.100a3-10), Aristotle posits a sequence of steps in mental development: sense perception produces memory which (in combination with intuition) produces human experience (empeiria), which produces art and science. Through a widening movement of understanding (really, a non-discursive form of induction), intuition transforms observation and memory so as to produce knowledge (without argument). This intuitive knowledge is even more reliable than science. As Aristotle writes in key passages at the end of the Posterior Analytics, “no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than scientific knowledge,” and “nothing except intuition can be truer than scientific knowledge.” (100b8ff, Mure, slightly emended.)

Aristotelian intuition supplies the first principles (archai) of human knowledge: concepts, universal propositions, definitions, the laws of logic, the primary principles of the specialized science, and even moral concepts such as the various virtues. This is why, according to Aristotle, intuition must be viewed as infallible. We cannot claim that the first principles of human intelligence are dubious and then turn around and use those principles to make authoritative claims about the possibility (or impossibility) of knowledge. If we begin to doubt intuition, that is, human intelligence at its most fundamental level of operation, we will have to doubt everything else that is built upon this universal foundation: science, philosophy, knowledge, logic, inference, and so forth. Aristotle never tries to prove first principles. He acknowledges that when it comes to the origins of human thought, there is a point when one must simply stop asking questions. As he points out, any attempt at absolute proof would lead to an infinite regress. In his own words: “It is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything; there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration.” (Metaphysics, 1006a6ff, Ross.) Aristotle does make arguments, for example, that meaningful speech presupposes a logical axiom like the principle of non-contradiction, but that is not, strictly speaking, a proof of the principle.

Needless to say, Aristotle’s reliance on intuition has provoked a good deal of scholarly disagreement. Contemporary commentators such as Joseph Owens, G. L. Owen, and Terrence Irwin have argued that Aristotelian first principles begin in dialectic. On their influential account, we arrive at first principles through a weaker form of argument that revolves around a consideration of “endoxa,” the proverbial opinions of the many and/or the wise. Robin Smith (and others) severely criticize their account. The idea that mere opinion could somehow give rise to rigorous scientific knowledge conflicts with Aristotle’s settled view that less reliable knowledge cannot provide sufficient logical support for the more reliable knowledge. As we discuss below, endoxa do provide a starting point for dialectical (and ethical) arguments in Aristotle’s system. They are, in his mind, a potent intellectual resource, a library of stored wisdom and right opinion. They may include potent expressions of first principles already discovered by other thinkers and previous generations. But as Aristotle makes clear at the end of the Posterior Analytics and elsewhere, the recognition that something is a first principle depends directly on intuition. As he reaffirms in the Nicomachean Ethics, “it is intuitive reason that grasps the first principles.” (VI.6.1141a7, Ross.)

If Irwin and his colleagues seek to limit the role of intuition in Aristotle, authors such as Lambertus Marie de Rijk and D. W. Hamlyn go to an opposite extreme, denying the importance of the inductive syllogism and identifying induction (epagoge) exclusively with intuition. De Rijk claims that Aristotelian induction is “a pre-argumentation procedure consisting in . . . [a] disclosure [that] does not take place by a formal, discursive inference, but is, as it were, jumped upon by an intuitive act of knowledge.” (Semantics and Ontology, I.2.53, 141-2.) Although this position seems extreme, it seems indisputable that inductive syllogism depends on intuition, for without intuition (understood as intelligent discernment), one could not recognize the convertibility of subject and middle terms (discussed above). Aristotle also points out that one needs intuition to recognize the (ostensible) definitions so crucial to the practice of Aristotelian science. We must be able to discern the difference between accidental and necessary or essential properties before coming up with a definition. This can only come about through some kind of direct (non-discursive) discernment. Aristotle proposes a method for discovering definitions called division—we are to divide things into smaller and smaller sub-groups—but this method depends wholly on nous. (Cf. Posterior Analytics, II.13.) Some modern Empiricist commentators, embarrassed by such mystical-sounding doctrines, warn that this emphasis on non-discursive reasoning collapses into pure rationalism (or Platonism), but this is a caricature. What Aristotle means by rational “intuition” is not a matter of pure, disembodied thought. One does not arrive at first principles by closing one’s eyes and retreating from the world (as with Cartesian introspection). For Aristotle, first principles arise through a vigorous interaction of the empirical with the rational; a combination of rationality and sense experience produces the first seeds of human understanding.

Note that Aristotle believes that there are first principles (koinai archai) that are common to all fields of inquiry, such as the principle of non-contradiction or the law of excluded middle, and that each specialized science has its own first principles. We may recover these first principles second-hand by a (dialectical) review of authorities. Or, we can derive them first hand by analysis, by dividing the subject matter we are concerned with into its constituent parts. At the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle explains, “What is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. . . . Similarly a child begins by calling all men ‘father,’ and all women ‘mother,’ but later on distinguishes each of them.” (I.1.184a22-184b14, Hardie, Gaye.) Just as children learn to distinguish their parents from other human beings, those who successfully study a science learn to distinguish the different natural kinds that make up the whole of a scientific phenomenon. This precedes the work of induction and deduction already discussed. Once we have the parts (or the aspects), we can reason about them scientifically.

14. Rhetoric

Argumentation theorists (less aptly characterized as informal logicians) have critiqued the ascendancy of formal logic, complaining that the contemporary penchant for symbolic logic leaves one with an abstract mathematics of empty signs that cannot be applied in any useful way to larger issues. Proponents of formal logic counter that their specialized formalism allows for a degree of precision otherwise not available and that any focus on the substantive meaning or truth of propositions is a distraction from logical issues per se. We cannot readily fit Aristotle into one camp or the other. Although he does provide a formal analysis of the syllogism, he intends logic primarily as a means of acquiring true statements about the world. He also engages in an enthusiastic investigation of less rigorous forms of reasoning included in the study of dialectic and rhetoric.

Understanding precisely what Aristotle means by the term “dialectics” (dialektike) is no easy task. He seems to view it as the technical study of argument in general or perhaps as a more specialized investigation into argumentative dialogue. He intends his rhetoric (rhetorike), which he describes as the counterpart to dialectic, as an expansive study of the art of persuasion, particularly as it is directed towards a non-academic public. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that Aristotle reserves a place in his logic for a general examination of all arguments, for scientific reasoning, for rhetoric, for debating techniques of various sorts, for jurisprudential pleading, for cross-examination, for moral reasoning, for analysis, and for non-discursive intuition.

Aristotle distinguishes between what I will call, for convenience, rigorous logic and persuasive logic. Rigorous logic aims at epistēmē, true belief about what is eternal, necessary, universal, and unchanging. (Aristotle sometimes qualifies this to include “for the most part” scientific knowledge.) Persuasive logic aims at acceptable, probable, or convincing belief (what we might call “opinion” instead of knowledge.) It deals with approximate truth, with endoxa (popular or proverbial opinions), with reasoning that is acceptable to a particular audience, or with claims about accidental properties and contingent events. Persuasive syllogisms have the same form as rigorous syllogisms but are understood as establishing their conclusions in a weaker manner. As we have already seen, rigorous logic produces deductive and inductive syllogisms; Aristotle indicates that persuasive logic produces, in a parallel manner, enthymemes, analogies, and examples. He defines an enthymeme as a deduction “concerned with things which may, generally speaking, be other than they are,” with matters that are “for the most part only generally true,” or with “probabilities and signs” (Rhetoric, I.2.1357a, Roberts). He also mentions that the term “enthymeme” may refer to arguments with missing premises. (Rhetoric, 1.2.1357a16-22.) When it comes to induction, Aristotle’s presentation is more complicated, but we can reconstruct what he means in a more straightforward manner.

The persuasive counterpart to the inductive syllogism is the analogy and the example, but the example is really a composite argument formed from first, an analogy and second, an enthymeme. Some initial confusion is to be expected as Aristotle’s understanding of analogies differs somewhat from contemporary accounts. In contemporary treatments, analogies depend on a direct object(s)-to-object(s) comparison. Aristotelian analogy, on the other hand, involves reasoning up to a general principle. We are to conclude (1) that because individual things of a certain nature X have property z, everything that possesses nature X has property z. But once we know that every X possesses property z, we can make a deduction (2) that some new example of nature X will also have property z. Aristotle calls (1), the inductive movement up to the generalization, an analogy (literally, an argument from likeness=ton homoion); he calls (2), the deductive movement down to a new case, an enthymeme; and he considers (1) + (2), the combination of the analogy and the enthymeme together, an example (paradeigma). He presents the following argument from example in the Rhetoric (I.2.1357b31-1358a1). Suppose we wish to argue that Dionysus, the ruler, is asking for a bodyguard in order to set himself up as despot. We can establish this by a two-step process. First, we can draw a damning analogy between previous cases where rulers asked for a bodyguard and induce a general rule about such practices. We can insist that Peisistratus, Theagenes, and other known tyrants, were scheming to make themselves despots, that Peisistratus, Theagenes, and other known tyrants also asked for a bodyguard, and that therefore, everyone who asks for a bodyguard is scheming to make themselves dictators. But once we have established this general rule, we can move on to the second step in our argument, using this conclusion as a premise in an enthymeme. We can argue that all people asking for a bodyguard are scheming to make themselves despots, that Dionysius is someone asking for a bodyguard, and that therefore, Dionysius must be scheming to make himself despot. This is not, in Aristotle’s mind, rigorous reasoning. Nonetheless, we can, in this way, induce probable conclusions and then use them to deduce probable consequences. Although these arguments are intended to be persuasive or plausible rather than scientific, but the reasoning strategy mimics the inductive-deductive movement of science (without compelling, of course, the same degree of belief).

We should point out that Aristotle does not restrict himself to a consideration of purely formal issues in his discussion of rhetoric. He famously distinguishes, for example, between three means of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. As we read, at the beginning of his Rhetoric: “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. . . . [Firstly,] persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. . . . Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. . . . Thirdly, persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved [the point] by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.” (Rhetoric, I.2.1356a2-21, Roberts.) Aristotle concludes that effective arguers must (1) understand morality and be able to convince an audience that they themselves are good, trustworthy people worth listening to (ethos); (2) know the general causes of emotion and be able to elicit them from specific audience (pathos); and (3) be able to use logical techniques to make convincing (not necessarily sound) arguments (logos). Aristotle broaches many other issues we cannot enter into here. He acknowledges that the goal of rhetoric is persuasion, not truth. Such techniques may be bent to immoral or dishonest ends. Nonetheless, he insists that it is in the public interest to provide a comprehensive and systematic survey of the field.

We might mention two other logical devices that have a place in Aristotle’s work: the topos and the aporia. Unfortunately, Aristotle never explicitly explains what a topos is. The English word “topic” does not do justice to the original notion, for although Aristotelian topoi may be organized around subject matter, they focus more precisely on recommended strategies for successful arguing. (The technical term derives from a Greek word referring to a physical location. Some scholars suggest a link to ancient mnemonic techniques that superimposed lists on familiar physical locations as a memory aid.) In relevant discussions (in the Topics and the Rhetoric) Aristotle offers helpful advice about finding (or remembering) suitable premises, about verbally out-manoeuvring an opponent, about finding forceful analogies, and so on. Examples of specific topoi would include discussions about how to argue which is the better of two alternatives, how to substitute terms effectively, how to address issues about genus and property, how to argue about cause and effect, how to conceive of sameness and difference, and so on. Some commentators suggest that different topoi may have been used in a classroom situation in conjunction with student exercises and standardized texts, or with written lists of endoxa, or even with ready-made arguments that students were expected to memorize.

An aporia is a common device in Greek philosophy. The Greek word aporia (plural, aporiai) refers to a physical location blocked off by obstacles where there is no way out; by extension, it means, in philosophy, a mental perplexity, an impasse, a paradox or puzzle that stoutly resists solution. Aristotle famously suggests that philosophers begin with aporiai and complete their task by resolving the apparent paradoxes. An attentive reader will uncover many aporiai in Aristotle who begins many of his treatises with a diaporia, a survey of the puzzles that occupied previous thinkers. Note that aporiai cannot be solved through some mechanical rearrangement of symbolic terms. Solving puzzles requires intelligence and discernment; it requires some creative insight into what is at stake.

15. Fallacies

In a short work entitled Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle introduces a theory of logical fallacies that has been remarkably influential. His treatment is abbreviated and somewhat obscure, and there is inevitably scholarly disagreement about precise exegesis. Aristotle thinks of fallacies as instances of specious reasoning; they are not merely errors but hidden errors. A fallacy is an incorrect reasoning strategy that gives the illusion of being sound or somehow conceals the underlying problem. Aristotle divides fallacies into two broad categories: those which depend on language (sometimes called verbal fallacies) and those that are independent of language (sometimes called material fallacies). There is some scholarly disagreement about particular fallacies, but traditional English names and familiar descriptions follow. Linguistic fallacies include: homonymy (verbal equivocation), ambiguity (amphiboly or grammatical equivocation), composition (confusing parts with a whole), division (confusing a whole with parts), accent (equivocation that arises out of mispronunciation or misplaced emphasis) and figure of speech (ambiguity resulting from the form of an expression). Independent fallacies include accident (overlooking exceptions), converse accident (hasty generalization or improper qualification), irrelevant conclusion, affirming the consequent (assuming an effect guarantees the presence of one possible cause), begging the question (assuming the point), false cause, and complex question (disguising two or more questions as one). Logicians, influenced by scholastic logic, often gave these characteristic mistakes Latin names: compositio for composition, divisio for division, secundum quid et simpliciter for converse accident, ignoranti enlenchi for nonrelevant conclusion, and petitio principii for begging the question.

Consider three brief examples of fallacies from Aristotle’s original text. Aristotle formulates the following amphiboly (which admittedly sounds awkward in English): “I wish that you the enemy may capture.” (Sophistical Refutations, 4.166a7-8, Pickard-Cambridge.) Clearly, the grammatical structure of the statement leaves it ambiguous as to whether the speaker is hoping that the enemy or “you” be captured. In discussing complex question, he supplies the following perplexing example: “Ought one to obey the wise or one’s father?” (Ibid., 12.173a21.) Obviously, from a Greek perspective, one ought to obey both. The problem is that the question has been worded in such a way that anyone who answers will be forced to reject one moral duty in order to embrace the other. In fact, there are two separate questions here—Should one obey the wise? Should one obey one’s father?—that have been illegitimately combined to produce a single question with a single answer. Finally, Aristotle provides the following time-honoured example of affirming the consequent: “Since after the rain the ground is wet, we suppose that if the ground is wet, it has been raining; whereas that does not necessarily follow” (Ibid., 5.167b5-8.) Aristotle’s point is that assuming that the same effect never has more than one cause misconstrues the true nature of the world. The same effect may have several causes. Many of Aristotle’s examples have to do with verbal tricks which are entirely unconvincing—for example, the person who commits the fallacy of division by arguing that the number “5” is both even and odd because it can be divided into an even and an odd number: “2” and “3.” (Ibid., 4.166a32-33.) But the interest here is theoretical: figuring out where an obviously-incorrect argument or proposition went wrong. We should note that much of this text, which deals with natural language argumentation, does not presuppose the syllogistic form. Aristotle does spend a good bit of time considering how fallacies are related to one another. Fallacy theory, it is worth adding, is a thriving area of research in contemporary argumentation theory. Some of these issues are hotly debated.

16. Moral Reasoning

In the modern world, many philosophers have argued that morality is a matter of feelings, not reason. Although Aristotle recognizes the connative (or emotional) side of morality, he takes a decidedly different tack. As a virtue ethicist, he does not focus on moral law but views morality through the lens of character. An ethical person develops a capacity for habitual decision-making that aims at good, reliable traits such as honesty, generosity, high-mindedness, and courage. To modern ears, this may not sound like reason-at-work, but Aristotle argues that only human beings—that is, rational animals—are able to tell the difference between right and wrong. He widens his account of rationality to include a notion of practical wisdom (phronesis), which he defines as “a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man.” (Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5.1140b4-5, Ross, Urmson). The operation of practical wisdom, which is more about doing than thinking, displays an inductive-deductive pattern similar to science as represented in Figure 3. It depends crucially on intuition or nous. One induces the idea of specific virtues (largely, through an exercise of non-discursive reason) and then deduces how to apply these ideas to particular circumstances. (Some scholars make a strict distinction between “virtue” (areté) understood as the mental capacity which induces moral ideas and “phronesis” understood as the mental capacity which applies these ideas, but the basic structure of moral thinking remains the same however strictly or loosely we define these two terms.)

Figure 3

The Inductive-Deductive Method of Aristotelian Ethics

We can distinguish then between moral induction and moral deduction. In moral induction, we induce an idea of courage, honesty, loyalty, and so on. We do this over time, beginning in our childhood, through habit and upbringing. Aristotle writes that the successful moral agent “must be born with an eye, as it were, by which to judge rightly and choose what is truly good.” (Ibid., VI.7.1114b6ff.) Once this intuitive capacity for moral discernment has been sufficiently developed—once the moral eye is able to see the difference between right and wrong,—we can apply moral norms to the concrete circumstances of our own lives. In moral deduction, we go on to apply the idea of a specific virtue to a particular situation. We do not do this by formulating moral arguments inside our heads, but by making reasonable decisions, by doing what is morally required given the circumstances. Aristotle refers, in this connection, to the practical syllogism which results “in a conclusion which is an action.” (Movement of Animals, 701a10ff, Farquharson.) Consider a (somewhat simplified) example. Suppose I induce the idea of promise-keeping as a virtue and then apply it to question of whether I should pay back the money I borrowed from my brother. The corresponding theoretical syllogism would be: Promise-keeping is good; giving back the money I owe my brother is an instance of promise-keeping; so giving the back the money I owe my brother is good.” In the corresponding practical syllogism, I do not conclude with a statement: “this act is good.” I go out and pay back the money I owe my brother. The physical exchange of money counts as the conclusion. In Aristotle’s moral system, general moral principles play the role of an ostensible definition in science. One induces a general principle and deduces a corresponding action. Aristotle does believe that moral reasoning is a less rigorous form of reasoning than science, but chiefly because scientific demonstrations deal with universals whereas the practical syllogism ends a single act that must be fitted to contingent circumstances. There is never any suggestion that morality is somehow arbitrary or subjective. One could set out the moral reasoning process using the moral equivalent of an inductive syllogism and a scientific demonstration.

Although Aristotle provides a logical blueprint for the kind of reasoning that is going on in ethical decision-making, he obviously does not view moral decision-making as any kind of mechanical or algorithmic procedure. Moral induction and deduction represent, in simplified form, what is going on. Throughout his ethics, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of context. The practice of morality depends then on a faculty of keen discernment that notices, distinguishes, analyzes, appreciates, generalizes, evaluates, and ultimately decides. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he includes practical wisdom in his list of five intellectual virtues. (Scholarly commentators variously explicate the relationship between the moral and the intellectual virtues.) Aristotle also discusses minor moral virtues such as good deliberation (eubulia), theoretical moral understanding (sunesis), and experienced moral judgement (gnome). And he equates moral failure with chronic ignorance or, in the case of weakness of will (akrasia), with intermittent ignorance.

17. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Sources

Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

The standard scholarly collection of translations.

Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1944 and 1960.

A scholarly, bilingual edition.

b. Secondary Sources

This list is intended as a window on a diversity of approaches and problems.

Barnes, Jonathan, (Aristotle) Posterior Analytics. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York : Oxford University Press, 1994.
Biondi, Paolo. Aristotle: Posterior Analytics II.19. Quebec, Q.C.: Les Presses de l’Universite Laval, 2004.
Ebbesen, Sten, Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi, Vol. 1: The Greek Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 1981.
Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. “More on Aristotelian Epagoge.” Phronesis, 24 (1979): 301-319.
Englebretsen, George. Three Logicians: Aristotle, Leibnitz, and Sommers and the Syllogistic. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1981.

See also Sommers, below.

Garrett, Dan, and Edward Barbanell. Encyclopedia of Empiricism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Govier, Trudy. Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Providence, R.I.: Floris, 1987.
Groarke, Louis. “A Deductive Account of Induction,” Science et Esprit, 52 (December 2000), 353-369.
Groarke, Louis. An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something From Nothing. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Hamlyn, D. W. Aristotle’s De Anima Books II and III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Hamlyn, D. W. “Aristotelian Epagoge.” Phronesis 21 (1976): 167-184.
Irwin, Terence. Aristotle’s First Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Keyt, David. “Deductive Logic,” in A Companion to Aristotle, George Anaganostopoulos, London: Blackwell, 2009, pp. 31-50.
Łukasiewicz, Jan. Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Oxford University Press, 1957.
McCaskey, John, “Freeing Aristotelian Epagôgê from Prior Analytics II 23,” Apeiron, 40:4 (December, 2007), pp. 345–74.
McKirahan, Richard Jr. Principles and Proofs: Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstrative Species. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Parry, William, and Edward Hacker. Aristotelian Logic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Peters, F. E., Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. New York: NYU Press, 1967.
Rijk, Lambertus Marie de. Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology. Boston, M.A.: Brill, 2002.
Smith, Robin. “Aristotle on the Uses of Dialectic,” Synthese , Vol. 96, No. 3, 1993, 335-358.
Smith, Robin. Aristotle, Prior Analytics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989.
Smith, Robin. “Aristotle’s Logic,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E, Zalta. ed. Stanford, CA., 2000, 2007.

An excellent introduction to Aristotle’s logic (with a different focus).

Smith, Robin. “Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration,” in A Companion to Aristotle, 52-65.
Sommers, Fred, and George Englebretsen, An Invitation to Formal Reasoning: The Logic of Terms. Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2000.

Author Information

Louis F. Groarke
Email: lgroarke@stfx.ca
St. Francis Xavier University
Canada

Aristotle: Metaphysics

When Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings we know as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.

Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?

I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own.

1. Aristotle and Plato

The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues is one who posited that, for every name we give to bodies in the world there is a bodiless being in another world, one while they are many, static while they are changing, perfect while they are altogether distasteful. Not surprisingly, those for whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd, and welcome an Aristotle whom they find saying that being in its highest form is found in an individual man or horse, that mathematical things are abstractions from sensible bodies, and that, if there is an ideal man apart from men, in virtue of whom they are all called men, then there must be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form and the men can have the same name, and yet a fourth, and so on. You can't stop adding new ideal men until you are willing to grant that it was absurd to add the first one, or anything at all beyond just plain men. This is hard-headed, tough-minded Aristotle, not to be intimidated by fancy, mystical talk, living in the world we live in and knowing it is the only world there is. This Aristotle, unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic selves. He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out of their contexts. The true Aristotle indeed takes at face value the world as we find it and all our ordinary opinions about it--takes them, examines them, and finds them wanting. It is the world as we find it which continually, for Aristotle, shows that our ordinary, materialist prejudices are mistaken, and the abandonment of those prejudices shows in turn that the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the world as we must reflect upon it is a much richer world, mysterious and exciting.

Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues was a battle you won by losing, an eye-opening experience from which, if there is no going forward, there is certainly no turning back, should get to know this Aristotle. But you will find standing in your way all those passages in which Aristotle seems to be discussing the dialogues and does so in a shallow way. Each dialogue has a surface in which Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths which invite qualification and correction, argues from answers given by others as though he shared their opinions, and pretends to be at a loss about everything. Plato never straightens things out for his readers, any more than Socrates does for his hearers. To do so would be to soothe us, to lull us to sleep as soon as we've begun to be distressed by what it feels like to be awake. Platonic writing, like Socratic talk, is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking, by presenting, defending, and criticizing plausible responses to important questions. The Platonic-Socratic words have only done their work when we have gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a collection of just what they were intended to be -- unsatisfactory assertions. Hippocrates Apostle finds 81 places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle disagrees with Plato. It is not surprising that Aristotle himself uses Plato's name in almost none of those places. Aristotle is addressing an audience of students who have read the dialogues and is continuing the work of the dialogues. Many, perhaps most, of Aristotle's students would, like scholars today, find theories and answers in Plato's dialogues. Aristotle would not be earning his keep as a teacher of philosophy if he did not force his students beyond that position. Aristotle constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best and most comprehensive texts he and his students share. Aristotle disagrees with Plato about some things, but less extensively and less deeply than he disagrees with every other author that he names. The Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack on Plato just because Plato's books are so much better than anything left by Thales, Empedocles or anyone else.

My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is one book with one complex argument, and my second is that, in cohering within itself, the Metaphysics may cohere with the Platonic dialogues. I assume that discussions in the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh to Aristotle's formulations, while they in turn may be taken as giving shape to those discussions. One need only try a very little of this to find a great deal beginning to fall into place. For example, listen to Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 9 of the Metaphysics: "the Forms ...are not the causes of motion or of any other change ...And they do not in any way help either towards the knowledge of the other things..or towards their existence ...Moreover, all other things do not come to be from the Forms in any of the usual senses of 'from.' And to say that the Forms are patterns and that the other things participate in them is to use empty words and poetic metaphors." A devastating attack on Plato, is it not? Or is it? Aristotle says that positing the Forms explains no single thing that one wants to know. But doesn't Socrates say in the Phaedo that to call beauty itself the cause of beauty in beautiful things is a "safe but stupid answer"--that one must begin with it but must also move beyond it? Again, everyone knows that the Platonic Socrates claimed that the forms were separate from the things in the sensible world, off by themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the forms were in the things. Recall the Phaedo passage just referred to. Does not Socrates say that the cause of heat in a hot thing is not heat itself but fire? Where, then, is the form for Socrates? Aristotle taught that the causes of characteristics of things were to be looked for not in a separate world of forms but in the primary instances of those characteristics right here in the world. This doctrine may seem to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle himself explain it in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Metaphysics: "of things to which the same predicate belongs, the one to which it belongs in the highest degree is that in virtue of which it belongs also to the others. For example, fire is the hottest of whatever is truly called 'hot', for fire is cause of hotness in the others." Do you hear an echo? Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be understood as always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or is it? Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist that it would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life, motion, and soul belong to the intelligible things? Do they not indeed define being as a power to act or be affected? Does not Socrates in the Theaetetus entertain the same definition when he construes the world as made up of an infinity of powers to act and be affected? Plato's dialogues do not set forth a theory of forms. They set forth a way to get started with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether within that way. Much in his writings that is a closed book to those who insist on seeing him as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets the dialogues serve as the key.

2. Translating Aristotle

Then we shall not hesitate to take whatever light we can find in the dialogues and shine it on Aristotle's text at least to see if anything comes into the light. And this brings me to a third assumption: the English word substance is of no help in understanding Aristotle's word ousia. The central question of theMetaphysics is, What is ousia? Aristotle claims that it is the same as the question, What is being? and that it is in fact the question everyone who has ever done any philosophy or physics has been asking. Since we do not share Aristotle's language we cannot know what claim he is making until we find a way to translate ousia. The translators give us the word substance only because earlier translators and commentators did so, while they in turn did so because still earlier translators into Latin rendered it assubstantia. Early modern philosophy, in all the European languages, is full of discussions of substance which stem from Latin versions of Aristotle. Though oral traditions keep meanings alive this written tradition has buried Aristotle's meaning irretrievably. We must ignore it, and take our access to the meaning of ousia from Plato's use of it, but before we do so a quick look at where the word substance came from may help us bury it.

The earliest Latin translations of Aristotle tried a number of ways of translating ousia, but by the fourth century AD, when St. Augustine lived, only two remained in use: essentia was made as a formal parallel to ousia, from the feminine singular participle of the verb to be plus an abstract noun ending, so that the whole would be roughly equivalent to an English translation being-ness; the second translation,substantia, was an attempt to get closer to ousia by interpreting Aristotle's use of it as something like "persisting substratum". Augustine, who had no interest in interpreting Aristotle, thought that, while everything in the world possesses substantia, a persisting underlying identity, the fullness of being suggested by the word essentia could belong to no created thing but only to their creator. Aristotle, who is quite explicit on the point that creation is impossible, believed no such thing, and Augustine didn't think he did. But Augustine's own thinking offered a consistent way to distinguish two Latin words whose use had become muddled. Boethius, in his commentaries on Aristotle, followed Augustine's lead, and hence always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don't-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends.

3. The Meaning of Ousia (Being) in Plato

What does ousia mean? It is already a quirky, idiomatic word in ordinary use when Plato gets hold of it. By a quirk of our own language one may say indeed that it means substance, but only, I repeat only, in the sense in which a rich man is called a man of substance. You may safely allow your daughter to marry him because you know where he will be and what he will be doing tomorrow and twenty years from now.Ousia meant permanent property, real estate, non-transferable goods: not the possessions we are always using up or consuming but those that remain--land, houses, wealth of the kind one never spends since it breeds new wealth with no expense of itself. When Socrates asks Meno for the ousia of the bee he is not using a technical philosophical term but a metaphor: what is the estate of a bee that each one inherits simply by being born a bee? A man of substance who has permanent wealth is who he is because of what he owns. A bee is to his permanent and his variable characteristics as a man is to his permanent and his spendable wealth. The metaphor takes a second step when applied to virtue: the varying instances of virtue in a man, a woman, a slave, and the rest must all have some unvarying core which makes them virtues. There must be some single meaning to which we always refer when we pronounce anything a virtue. This is the step Socrates continually insists that Meno must take. But remember, in the slave-boy scene, Socrates twice entices the slave-boy into giving plausible incorrect answers about the side of the double square. Is there an ousia of virtue? Socrates uses the word not as the result of an induction or abstraction or definition, but by stretching an already strained metaphor. People have disposable goods which come and go and ousiatic goods which remain; bees have some characteristics in which they differ, and others in which they share; the virtues differ, but are they the same in anything but name? Even if they are, must it be a definition that they share? Not all men have ousia. Ordinarily only a few men do. The rest of us work for them, sell to them, marry them, gather in the hills to destroy them, but do not have what they have. Perhaps there are only a few virtues, or only one.

The word ousia, as Plato's Socrates handles it, seems to be a double-edged weapon. It explicitly rejects Meno's way of saying what virtue is, but implicitly suggests that the obvious alternative may fail as well. If virtue is not simply a meaningless label used ambiguously for many unconnected things, that does not mean that it must unambiguously name the same content in each of the things it names. Since ousia is our metaphor, let us ask what wealth means. If a poor man has a hut and a cow and some stored-up food, are they his wealth? He is certainly not wealthy. On the other hand, King Lear says that "our basest beggars Are in poorest thing superfluous"; no human life is cut so fine as to lack anything beyond what satisfies bare need. The beggar, like the family on welfare, does not have the means to satisfy need, but need not for that reason forego those possessions which give life comfort or continuity. His wealth is derived from the wealth of others. The small farmer may maintain something of the independence a wealthy man enjoys, but one bad year could wipe him out. He will either accumulate enough to become wealthy himself, or his life will remain a small-scale analogy to that of the wealthy. Wealth means, first of all, only that which a few people have and the rest of us lack, but because it means that, it also, at the same time, means secondarily something that all of us possess. There is an ambiguity at work in the meaning of the word "wealth" which is not a matter of a faulty vocabulary and not a matter of language at all: it expresses the way things are. Wealth of various kinds exists by derivation from and analogy to wealth in the emphatic sense. Indeed Meno, who spontaneously defines virtue by listing virtues, is equally strongly inclined to say that the power to rule over men and possessions is the only virtue there is. He cannot resolve the logical difficulties Socrates raises about his answers, but they are all resolvable. Meno in fact believes that virtue is ousia in its simple sense of big money, and that women, children, and slaves can only have virtue derivatively and ambiguously. Socrates' question is one of those infuriatingly ironic games he is always playing. The ousia of virtue, according to Meno and Gorgias, is ousia.

4. Ousia in Aristotle

When the word ousia turns up in texts of Aristotle, it is this hidden history of its use, and not its etymology, which is determining its meaning. First of all, the word fills a gap in the language of being, since Greek has no word for thing. The two closest equivalents are to on and to chrema. To on simply means whatever is, and includes the color blue, the length two feet, the action walking, and anything at all that can be said to be. To chrema means a thing used, used up, spent, or consumed; any kind of possession, namely, that is not ousia. ousia holds together, remains, and makes its possessor emphatically somebody. In the vocabulary of money, ousia is to to chremata as whatever remains constant in a thing is to all theonta that come and go. ousia also carries with it the sense of something that belongs somehow to all but directly and fully only to a few. The word is ready-made to be the theme of Aristotle's investigation of being, because both the word and the investigation were designed by Plato. For Aristotle, the inquiry into the nature of being begins with the observation that being is meant in many ways. It is like Meno's beginning, and it must be subjected to the same Socratic questioning.

Suppose that there is some one core of meaning to which we refer whenever we say that something is. What is its content? Hegel says of being as being:

"it is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination... it is mere abstraction... the absolutely negative... just Nothing."

And isn't he right, as Parmenides was before him? Leave aside all those characteristics in which beings differ, and what is left behind? To Aristotle, this means that being is not a universal or a genus. If being is the comprehensive class to which everything belongs, how does it come to have sub-classes? It would have to be divided with respect to something outside itself. Beings would have to be distinguished by possessing or failing to possess some characteristic, but that characteristic would have to be either a class within being, already separated off from the rest by reference to something prior, or a non-being. Since both are impossible, being must come already divided: the highest genera or ultimate classes of things must be irreducibly many. This is Aristotle's doctrine of the categories, and according to him being means at least eight different things.

5. The Doctrine of Categories

The categories have familiar names: quality, quantity, relation, time, place, action, being-acted upon. The question Socrates asked about things, What is it?, is too broad, since it can be answered truly with respect to any of the categories that apply, and many times in some of them. For example, I'll describe something to you: it is backstage now; it is red; it is three feet high; it is lying down and breathing. I could continue telling you what it is in this fashion for as long as I pleased and you would not know what it is. It is an Irish setter. What is different about that last answer? To be an Irish setter is not to be a quality or quantity or time or action but to be a whole which comprises many ways of being in those categories, and much change and indeterminacy in them. The redness, three-foot-high-ness, respiration and much else cohere in a thing which I have named in its thinghood by calling it an Irish setter. Aristotle calls this way of being ousia. Aristotle's logical works reflect upon the claims our speech makes about the world. The principal result of Aristotle's inquiry into the logical categories of being is, I think, the claim that the thinghood of things in the world is never reducible in our speech to any combination of qualities, quantities, relations, actions, and so on: that ousia or thinghood must be a separate category. What happens when I try to articulate the being of a thing such as an Irish setter? I define it as a dog with certain properties. But what then is a dog? It is an animal with certain properties, and an animal is an organism with certain properties, and an organism is a thing with the property life. At each level I meet, as dog, animal, organism, what Aristotle calls secondary ousia or secondary thinghood.

I set out to give an account of what makes a certain collection of properties cohere as a certain thing, and I keep separating off some of them and telling you that the rest cohere as a whole. At my last step, when I say that an organism is a living thing, the problem of secondary thinghood is present in its nakedness. Our speech, no matter how scientific, must always leave the question of the hanging-together of things as things a question.

6. The Central Question of the Metaphysics

Thus the logical inquiries bequeath to the Metaphysics its central question, which we are now in a position to translate. The question that was asked of old and will always be asked by anyone who is alive enough to wonder about anything is, What is being? What is a thing? What is the thinghood of things? What makes our world a world of things at all? We are here at the deepest postulate of Aristotelian philosophizing: the integrity of the world as a world and of anything in it which endures as itself for any time at all, is not self-explanatory, is something to be wondered at, is caused.

We are taught that a moving thing, if nothing disturbs it, will continue moving forever. Do you believe that? It is certainly true that a heavy thing in motion is as hard to stop as it was to set in motion, and that we cannot step out of moving automobiles without continuing, for a while, to share their motions. But these are evidences of persistence of motion, not at all the same thing as inertia of motion. There is no evidence of the latter. In principle there cannot be, because we cannot abolish all the world to observe an undisturbed moving thing. There is a powerful and in its way, beautiful, account of the world which assumes inertia, appealing to those experiences which suggest that motion at an unchanging speed is a state no different from that of rest. The hidden premise which leads from that step to the notion of inertia is the assumption that rest is an inert state. If it is not, the same evidence could lead to the conclusion that an unchanging speed is a fragile and vulnerable thing, as unlikely and as hard to come by as an unchanging anything. How can a balloon remain unchanged? It does so only so long as the air inside pushes out no harder and no less hard than the air outside pushes in. Is the air inside the balloon at rest? Can it be at rest as long as it is performing a task? Can the balloon be at rest if the air inside it cannot be? It can certainly remain in a place, like other apparently inert things, say a table. If you pulled the legs from under a table the top would fall, and if you removed the top the legs would fall. Leave them together and leave them alone and they do not move, but is the table at rest? Surely no more so than a pair of arm wrestlers, straining every muscle but unable to budge each other, can be said to be resting. But can't we find an inert thing anywhere in the world? How about a single lump of rock? But if I throw it in the air it will return to find a resting place. It seems to rest only when something blocks it, and if I let it rest on my hand or my head, something will make me uncomfortable. Can the rock be doing nothing? And if we cannot find inertia in a rock, where could it be? An animal is either full of circulating and respirating or it is rotting, and the same seems true of plants. But what in the world is not animal-like, plant-like, rock-like, or table-like? The world contains living and non-living natural beings, and it contains products of human making, and all of them are busy. From Aristotle's wondering and wonderful perspective, everything in the world is busy just continuing to be itself. This is not a "theory" of Aristotle's; it is a way of bringing the world to sight with the questioning intellect awake. Try that way of looking on for size: the world has nothing to lose for ceasing to be taken for granted. Consider an analogy. Ptolemy is content to say that Venus and Mercury happen to have the same longitudinal period as the sun and that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all happen to lag just as far behind the sun in any time as they have moved in anomaly. Copernicus, in the most passionate and convincing part of his argument, shows that these facts can be explained. Lucretius (whom we may substitute for Aristotle's favorite materialist, Empedocles) thought that cats and dogs and giraffes just happened to come about by accumulation, like the sands on the beach. Lucretius' failure to wonder at a giraffe, his reduction of the living to the blind and dead, is, from Aristotle's standpoint, a failure to recognize what is truly one, what is not just a heap, what is genuinely a thing.

The least thoughtful, least alert way of being in the world is to regard everything which remains itself as doing so causelessly, inertly. To seek a cause for the being-as-it-is of any thing is already to be in the grip of the question Aristotle says must always be asked. To seek the causes and sources of the being-as-it-is of everything that is, is to join Aristotle in his Copernican revolution which regards every manifestation of persistence, order, or recurrence as a marvel, an achievement. That everything in the world disclosed to our senses is in a ceaseless state of change, most of us would grant. That the world nevertheless hangs together enough to be experienced at all is a fact so large that we rarely take notice of it. But the two together--change, and a context of persistence out of which change can emerge--force one to acknowledge some non-human cause at work: for whichever side of the world--change or rest, order or dissolution--is simply its uncaused, inert way, the other side must be the result of effort. Something must be at work in the world, hidden to us, visible only in its effects, pervading all that is, and it must be either a destroyer or a preserver.

7. The World as Cosmos

That much seems to me to be demonstrable, but the next step is a difficult one to take because the world presents to us two faces: the living and the non-living. The thinghood of living things consists in organized unity, maintained through effort, at work in a variety of activities characteristic of each species; but a rock or a flame or some water or some dirt or some air is a thing in a much different way, unified only by accidental boundaries, indifferent to being divided or heaped together, at work only in some one local motion, up or down. Which is the aberration, life or non-life? For Aristotle the choice need not be made, since the distinction between the two forms of being only results from a confusion. Flesh, blood, bone, and hair would seem inorganic and inanimate if they were not organized into and animated as, say a cat. But earth, air, fire, and water, all of it, is always organized into and animate as the cosmos. The heavens enclose an organized body which has a size, a shape, and a hierarchical structure all of which it maintains by ceaseless, concerted activity. You may think that in believing this, Aristotle betrays an innocence which we cannot recover. But not only Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also Copernicus and Kepler believed the visible heaven to be a cosmos, and not only they, but also, amazingly, Newton himself. In our century, Einstein calculated the volume of the universe, and cosmology has once again become a respectable scientific pursuit. Moderns, for whom the spherical motion of the heavens no longer indicates that the heavens have boundaries, draw the same conclusion from the fact that there is darkness. Anyone who would take the assertion that his outlook is modern to include the denial that there is a cosmos would make a very shallow claim, one having more to do with poetic fashion than with reasoned conviction. The question of the cosmos has not been made obsolete, and the very least we must admit is that the appearance of an inorganic, inanimate nature is not conclusive and would result from our human-sized perspective whether there is a cosmos or not.

If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of the kind of being that belongs to every animal and plant in it. And if that is so, there is nothing left to display any other kind of being. Try it: take inventory. What is there? The color red is, only if it is the color of some thing. Color itself is, only if it is some one color, and the color of a thing. The relation "taller than" is, only if it is of two or more things. What has being but is not a thing must depend on some thing for its being. But on the other hand a mere thing, mere matter as we call it, using the word differently than Aristotle ever does, is an impossibility too. Relatively inert, rock-like being is the being of a part of what comes only in wholes--cosmos, plant, or animal. And all man-made things must borrow their material from natural things and their very holding-together from the natural tendencies of the parts of the cosmos. To be is to be alive; all other being is borrowed being. Any comprehensive account of things must come to terms with the special being of animals and plants: for Lucretius, living things are not marvels but a problem which he solves by dissolving them into the vast sea of inert purposelessness. For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder is not a state to be dissolved but a beckoning to be followed, and for Aristotle the wonderful animals and plants point the way to being itself, to that being qua being which is the source of all being, for we see it in the world in them and only in them.

Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things. All other being is, in one way or another, their effect. He is asking for their cause. At that point, his inquiry into the causes and sources of being itself, simply as being, merges with the inquiry in Book 2 of his Physics, where the question is, What is nature? The answer, as well, must be the same, and just as Aristotle concludes that nature is form, he concludes that being is form. Does the material of an animal make it what it is? Yes, but it cannot be the entire or even principal cause. If there is anything that is not simply the sum of its parts, it is an animal. It is continually making itself, by snatching suitable material from its environment and discarding unsuitable material. Add some sufficiently unsuitable material, like arsenic, and the sum of parts remains, but the animal ceases to be. The whole which is not accounted for by the enumeration of its parts is the topic of the last section of theTheaetetus, where Socrates offers several playful images of that kind of being: a wagon, a melody, the number six, and the example discussed at most length, which Aristotle borrows, the syllable.

8. Forms, Wholeness, and Thinghood

Aristotle insists that the syllable is never the sum of its letters. Socrates, of course, argues both sides of the question, and Theaetetus agrees both times. Let's try it ourselves. Take the word "put", p-u-t. voice the letters separately, as well as you can, and say them in succession, as rapidly as you can. I think you will find that, as long as you attempt to add sound to sound, you will have a grunt surrounded by two explosions of breath. When you voice the whole syllable as one sound, the a is already present when you begin sounding the p, and the t sound is already shaping the u. Try to pronounce the first two letters and add the third as an afterthought, and you will get two sounds. I have tried all this, and think it's true, but you must decide for yourself. Aristotle says that the syllable is the letters, plus something else besides; Socrates calls the something else a form, an eidos, while Aristotle calls it the thinghood of the thing. When I pronounce the syllable "put", I must have in mind the whole syllable in its wholeness before I can voice any of its parts in such a way as to make them come out parts of it. Now a syllable is about as transitory a being as one could imagine: it is made of breath, and it is gone as soon as it is uttered. But a craftsman works the same way as a maker of syllables. If he simply begins nailing and gluing together pieces of wood, metal, and leather, he is not likely to end up with a wagon; to do so, he must have the whole shape and work of the wagon in mind in each of his joinings and fittings. Even so, when he is finished, what he has produced is only held together by nails and glue. As soon as it is made, the wagon begins falling apart, and it does so the more, the more it is used. All the more perplexing then, is the animal or plant. It is perpetually being made and re-made after the form of its species, yet there is no craftsman at work on it. It is a composite of material and form, yet it is the material in it that is constantly being used up and replaced, while the form remains intact. The form is not in any artist's imagination, nor can it be an accidental attribute of its material. In the Physics, nature was traced back to form, and in the first half of the Metaphysics all being is traced to the same source. But what is form? Where is it? Is it a cause or is it caused? Most important of all, does it have being alone, on its own, apart from bodies? Does it emerge from the world of bodies, or is a body a thing impossible to be unless a form is somehow already present for it to have? Or is there something specious about the whole effort to make form either secondary to material or primary? Are they perhaps equal and symmetrical aspects of being, inseparable, unranked? Just as ultimate or first material, without any characteristics supplied by form, cannot be, why should not a pure form, not the form of anything, be regarded as its opposite pole and as equally impossible? Or have we perhaps stumbled on a nest of unanswerable questions? If form is the first principle of the science of physics, might it not be a first principle simply, behind which one cannot get, to which one may appeal for explanation but about which one cannot inquire? Aristotle says that if there were not things apart from bodies, physics would be first philosophy. But he calls physics second philosophy, and half theMetaphysics lies on the other side of the questions we have been posing. It consists in the uncovering of beings not disclosed to our senses, beings outside of and causal with respect to what we naively and inevitably take to be the whole world.

Aristotle marks the center and turning point of the Metaphysics with these words: "One must inquire about (form), for this is the greatest impasse. Now it is agreed that some of what is perceptible arethings, and so one must search first among these. For it is preferable to proceed toward what is better known. For learning occurs in all things in this way: through what is by nature less known toward the things more known. And just as in matters of action the task is to make the things that are good completely be good for each person, from out of the things that seem good to each, so also the task here is, from out of the things more known to one, to make the things known by nature known to him. Now what is known and primary to each of us is often known slightly, and has little or nothing of being; nevertheless, from the things poorly known but known to one, one must try to know the things that are known completely." (1029a 33 - b 11) The forest is dark, but one cannot get out of it without passing through it, carefully, calmly, attentively. It will do no good to move in circles. The passage just quoted connects with the powerful first sentence of the Metaphysics: "All human beings are by nature stretched out toward a state of knowing." Our natural condition is one of frustration, of being unable to escape a task of which the goal is out of reach and out of sight. Aristotle here likens our frustration as theoretical beings to our condition as practical beings: unhappiness has causes--we achieve it by seeking things--and if we can discover what we were seeking we might be able to make what is good ours. Similarly, if we cannot discern the goal of wisdom, we can at least begin examining the things that stand in our way.

9. The Being of Sensible Things

The next section of the Metaphysics, from Book 7, Chapter 4 through Book 9, is the beginning of an intense forward motion. These books are a painstaking clarification of the being of the things disclosed to our senses. It is here that Aristotle most heavily uses the vocabulary that is most his own, and everything he accomplishes in these books depends on the self-evidence of the meanings of these expressions. It is these books especially which Latinizing translators turn into gibberish. Words like essence, individual, and actuality must either be vague or be given arbitrary definitions. The words Aristotle uses are neither vague nor are they conceptual constructions; they call forth immediate, direct experiences which one must have at hand to see what Aristotle is talking about. They are not the kinds of words that books can explain; they are words of the kind that people must share before there can be books. That is why understanding a sentence of Aristotle is so often something that comes suddenly, in an insight that seems discontinuous from the puzzlement that preceded it. It is simply a matter of directing one's gaze. We must try to make sense of Books 7-9 because they are crucial to the intention of the Metaphysics. Aristotle has an argument independent of those books, which he makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in Book 12 of the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world. And he is able to go on in Book 12 to discover a good deal about that being. One could, then, skip from the third chapter of Book 7 to Book 12, and, having traced being to form, trace form back to its source. Aristotle would have done that if his whole intention had been to establish that the sensible world has a divine source, but had he done so he would have left no foundation for reversing the dialectical motion of his argument to understand the things in the world on the basis of their sources. Books 7-9 provide that foundation.

The constituents of the world we encounter with our senses are not sensations. The sensible world is not a mosaic of sensible qualities continuous with or adjacent to one another, but meets our gaze organized into things which stand apart, detached from their surroundings. I can indicate one of them to you by the mere act of pointing, because it has its own boundaries and holds them through time. I need not trace out the limits of the region of the visual field to which I refer your attention, because the thing thrusts itself out from, holds itself aloof from what is visible around it, making that visible residue mere background. My pointing therefore has an object, and it is an object because it keeps being itself, does not change randomly or promiscuously like Proteus, but holds together sufficiently to remain the very thing at which I pointed. This way of being, Aristotle calls being a "this". If I want to point out to you just this red of just this region of this shirt, I will have to do a good deal more than just point. .A "this" as Aristotle speaks of it is what comes forth to meet the act of pointing, is that for which Ã need not point and say "not that or that or that but just this," but need do nothing but point, since it effects its own separation from what it is not.

A table, a chair, a rock, a painting--each is a this, but a living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own this-ness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at all. Let us consider as an example of a living this, some one human being. Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has been in the sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because he chopped onions two days ago; he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents had the money and taste to send him to Harvard. All these details, and innumerably many more, belong to this human being. But in Aristotle's way of speaking, the details I have named are incidental to him: he is not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or Harvard-educated because he is a human being. He is each of those things because his nature bumped into that of something else and left him with some mark, more or less intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside from what he is on his own, self-sufficiently. What he is on his own, as a result of the activity that makes him be at all, is: two-legged, sentient, breathing, and all the other things he is simply as a human being. There is a difference between all the things he happens to be and the things he necessarily is on account of what he is. Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing not by happenstance but inevitably, as the "what it kept on being in the course of being at all" for a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush. The phrase to en einai is Aristotle's answer to the Socratic question, ti esti? What is a giraffe? Find some way of articulating all the things that every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the giraffe. What each of them is throughout its life, is the product at any instant for any one of them, of the activity that is causing it to be. That means that the answer to the question "What is a giraffe?", and the answer to the question "What is this giraffe?" are the same. Stated generally, Aristotle's claim is that a this, which is in the world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-was-to-be, and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be. This is not a commonplace thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it with the translators' version, "a per-se individual is identical with its essence."

10. Matter and Form in Aristotle

The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to be richer, fuller, more interesting than it can possibly be when it is reduced to a definition in speech, but this is a confusion. All that belongs to the living thing that is not implied by the definition of its species belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions with the other things in its environment. The definition attempts to penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity of making itself be whole and persist. There is nothing fuller than the whole, nothing richer than the life which is the winning and expressing of that wholeness, nothing more interesting than the struggle it is always waging unnoticed, a whole world of priority deeper and more serious than the personal history it must drag along with the species-drama it is constantly enacting. The reduction of the living thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a rectangular block of marble to the form of Hermes: less is more. Strip away the accretion of mere facts, and what is left is that without which even those facts could not have gained admittance into the world: the forever vulnerable foundation of all that is in the world, the shaping, ruling form, the incessant maintenance of which is the only meaning of the phrase self-preservation. Indeed even the bodily material of the living thing is present in the world only as active, only as forming itself into none of the other things it might have been but just this one thoroughly defined animal or plant. And this, finally, is Aristotle's answer to the question, What is form? Form is material at work according to a persisting definiteness of kind. Aristotle's definition of the soul in De Anima, soul is the being-at-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes the definition of form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is, at that stage of the inquiry, his definition of being.

Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification of form. Form cannot be derivative from or equivalent with material, because material on its own must be mere possibility. It cannot enter the world until it has achieved definiteness by getting to work in some way, and it cannot even be thought except as the possibility of some form. Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality is a subordinate way of being. The living body does not bring form into the world, it must receive form to come into the world. Form is primary and causal, and the original source of all being in the sensible world must be traced beyond the sensible world, to that which confers unity on forms themselves. If forms had no integrity of their own, the world and things could not hang together and nothing would be. At the end of Book 9, the question of being has become the question of formal unity, the question, What makes each form one? In the woven texture of the organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning of Book 10, is a laying out of all the ways things may be one. Glue, nails, and rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any longer, are natural shapes and motions, which have been shown to have a derivative sort of unity. All that is left in Aristotle's array of possibilities is the unity of that of which the thinking or the knowing is one.

This thread of the investigation, which we may call for convenience the biological one, converges in Book 12 with a cosmological one. The animal and plant species take care of their own perpetuation by way of generation, but what the parents pass on to the offspring is an identity which must hold together thanks to a timeless activity of thinking. The cosmos holds together in a different way: it seems to be literally and directly eternal by way of a ceaseless repetition of patterns of locomotion. An eternal motion cannot result from some other motion, but must have an eternal, unchanging cause. Again, Aristotle lays out all the possibilities. What can cause a motion without undergoing a motion? A thing desired can, and so can a thing thought. Can you think of a third? Aristotle says that there are only these two, and that, moreover, the first reduces to the second. When I desire an apple it is the fleshy apple and not the thought of it toward which I move, but it is the thought or imagining of the fleshy apple that moves me toward the apple. The desired object causes motion only as an object of thought. Just as the only candidate left to be the source of unity of form among the animals and plants was the activity of thinking, so again the only possible unmoved source for the endless circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking. Because it is deathless and because the heavens and nature and all that is depend upon it, Aristotle calls this activity God. Because it is always altogether at work, nothing that is thought by it is ever outside or apart from it: it is of thinking, simply. Again, because it is always altogether at work, nothing of it is ever left over outside of or apart from its work of thinking: it is thinking, simply. It is the pure holding-together of the pure holdable-together, activity active, causality caused. The world is, in all its being most deeply, and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible. So far is Aristotle from simply assuming the intelligibility of things, that he requires twelve books of argument to account for it. All being is dependent on the being of things; among things, the artificial are derived from the natural; because there is a cosmos, all natural things have being as living things; because all living things depend on either a species-identity or an eternal locomotion, there must be a self-subsisting activity of thinking.

The fact that there are a Book 13 and a Book 14 to the Metaphysics indicates that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet undergone its last transformation. With the completion of Book 12, the question of being becomes: What is the definition of the world? What is the primary intelligible structure that implies all that is permanent in the world? Books 13 and 14 of the Metaphysics examine the only two answers that anyone has ever proposed to that question outside of myths. They are: that the divine thinking is a direct thinking of all the animal and plant species, and that it is a thinking of the mathematical sources of things. The conclusions of these two books are entirely negative. The inquiry into being itself cannot come to rest by transferring to the divine source the species-identities which constitute the world, nor can they be derived from their mathematical aspects. Aristotle's final transformation of the question of being is into a question. Books 13 and 14 are for the sake of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield to a solution but insists on being faced and thought directly. Repeatedly, through the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the deepest things must be simple. One cannot speak the truth about them, nor even ask, a question about them, because they have no parts. They have no articulation in speech, but only contact with that which thinks. The ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at once What is all being at its roots? and What is the life of God?, and toward which the whole Metaphysics has been designed to clear the way, takes one beyond the limits of speech itself. The argument of the Metaphysics begins from our direct encounter with the sensible world, absorbs that world completely into speech, and carries its speech to the threshold of that on which world and speech depend. The shape of the book is a zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible simple things and veering away. By climbing to that life which is the being-at-work of thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose that life to ourselves in the only way possible, in the privacy of lived thinking. The Metaphysics is not an incomplete work: it is the utmost gift that a master of words can give.

11. References and Further Reading

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 1999.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2002.
Aristotle, On the Soul, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 2001.
Aristotle, Poetics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2006.
Aristotle, Physics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Rutgers U. P., 1995.

Author Information

Joe Sachs
Email: joe.sachs@sjc.edu
St. John's College

quarta-feira, 5 de dezembro de 2018

ARISTÓTELES (384 - 322 a.C.) - Parte I

Table of Contents

1. Life

2. Writings

3. Logic

4. Metaphysics

5. Philosophy of Nature

6. The Soul and Psychology

7. Ethics

8. Politics

9. Art and Poetics

Author Information

Aristotle: Biology

Table of Contents

1. His Life

2. The Scope of Aristotle’s Biological Works

3. The Specialist and the Generalist

4. The Two Modes of Causal Explanation

5. Aristotle’s Theory of Soul

6. The Biological Practice: Outlines of a Systematics

7. “The more and the less” and “Epi to polu”

8. Significant Achievements and Mistakes

9. Conclusion

10. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Text

b. Key Texts in Translation

c. Selected Secondary Sources

Author Information

Aristotle: Biology

Table of Contents

1. His Life

2. The Scope of Aristotle’s Biological Works

3. The Specialist and the Generalist

4. The Two Modes of Causal Explanation

5. Aristotle’s Theory of Soul

6. The Biological Practice: Outlines of a Systematics

7. “The more and the less” and “Epi to polu”

8. Significant Achievements and Mistakes

9. Conclusion

10. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Text

b. Key Texts in Translation

c. Selected Secondary Sources

Author Information

Aristotle: Ethics

Table of Contents

1. Habit

2. The Mean

3. Noble

4. References and Further Reading

Author Information

Aristotle: Logic

Table of Contents

1. The Organon

2. Categories

3. From Words into Propositions

4. Kinds of Propositions

5. Square of Opposition

The Traditional Square of Opposition

6. Laws of Thought

7. Existential Assumptions

8. Form versus Content

9. The Syllogism

10. Inductive Syllogism

11. Deduction versus Induction

12. Science

Figure 2

The Inductive-Deductive Method of Aristotelian Science

13. Non-Discursive Reasoning

14. Rhetoric

15. Fallacies

16. Moral Reasoning

Figure 3

The Inductive-Deductive Method of Aristotelian Ethics

17. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Sources

b. Secondary Sources

Author Information

Aristotle: Metaphysics