Chapter 5: Aristotle

Aristotle (mini bio)

• Plato’s most distinguished pupil

• “first philosophy” was the term he used to describe Metaphysics

• each thing is a combination of matter and form (you can’t one without the other)

Formal Cause

• asks ‘What is the thing’?

Material Cause

• asks ‘What the thing is made of?’

Efficient Cause

• asks ‘What made it?’

Final Cause

• asks ‘What purpose does it solve?’

Pure Actuality

• ultimate source of change

• ‘God’ - not referring to the ones from Abrahamic religions

Actuality and Potentiality

• Matter, he said, consists only of potentiality, because it cannot move or form itself.

• Nature (physis) and everything in the universe exist between these two poles. Things change as a process of actualizing potentialities.

Essence and Existence (Primary Meaning)

• an individual entity (ex rock)

Secondary Meaning

• the thing’s essence or definition

Eudaemonia (Happiness)

• measures the degree to which a person has lived a life of virtue.

Ten Basic Categories

• Aristotle believed that things can be categorized in ten different ways:

quantity, quality, relationship, location, time, posture, constitution, passivity, and activity

The Three Souls

• Aristotle believed humans have three souls

Vegetative Soul

• the sources of nourishment and reproduction

Animal Soul

• The basis of sensation as well as the ability to move

Nous

• the intelligent or spiritual soul

Third Man Argument

• Aristotle’s most famous argument against the Theory of Forms.

• View is that the form are universals — a quality that applies to multiple things.

Intuition

• a spontaneous non-inferential apprehending of a truth

• everyday knowledge is an inference from sense experience

Logic

• Aristotle is often said to be ‘The Father of ___’

• he was the first to study principles of sound inference or reasoning

Categorical Syllogism

• the name of any two-premise argument about the members of three categories of things, will help