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A-Z of Thought: Aristotle
Craig Bartholomew
Aristotle (384-322 BC) is undoubtedly one of the greatest
philosophers of all time and even today it is hard to overestimate his
significance. Greek philosophy has its origin in the sixth century BC
with Thales, but its high point was reached with Socrates, Socrates'
pupil Plato, and Plato's pupil Aristotle.
All three of these philosophers were passionate about the quest for truth, and in opposition to the Sophists - the "postmoderns" of the Greek era who thought that truth was unobtainable but that we could get on quite well without it - they insisted that we can know the truth about the world. But in a world which changes - the pre-Socratic Heraclitus famously commented that you never step in the same river twice - where is truth to be grounded?
For Plato the world of everyday reality with its flux and impermanence could never be the source of truth. It was like a world of shadows and one needed to move through it to contemplate the transcendent realm of forms and ideas and only then could you discern the nature of justice, truth and beauty in everyday life. Aristotle took a very different approach to his master, an approach which is rightly described as "Plato brought down to earth."
For Aristotle it was precisely in the observable realm of everyday life that truth was to be found. In contrast to Plato Aristotle developed his conceptual framework of being and categories. Everything that exists is a manifestation of being and it can be classified through the categories. The first category "substance" refers primarily to the individual entity; secondarily it refers to the form which gives the entity its particular character. The form is not, as with Plato, located in the transcendent realm but in the particular entity. The remaining nine categories are quantity (e.g. 95 kg.), quality (e.g. red, cold, good), relation (e.g. dependent upon technology), place (e.g. in the city), time (e.g. 2008), position, condition or state (e.g. running, sitting), possession (e.g. bald, i.e. being without hair), action (e.g. ploughing, becoming hungry).
For Aristotle entities become intelligible as they are placed within the framework of the categories. This is because things are formed in nature according to these categories and our minds are designed to perceive things according to the categories. Aristotle's philosophy is thus that of a thoroughgoing realism. He argued that our minds are such that we can extract the forms found in individual things and using our reason we can establish the relationship between forms. In this way the mind is able to represent reality as it is.
Aristotle's philosophy was foundational for Western thought in a multitude of disciplines: science and biology, logic and language, metaphysics and ethics. Prior to the Middle Ages many of Aristotle's works were nearly lost but re-emerged in Western thought thanks to Jewish and Muslim thinkers. In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas synthesised Aristotle with Christian thought, although Chesterton's question remains: did he bring Aristotle to Christ or Christ to Aristotle?
Aristotle's ethics focuses
on virtue and his thought is foundational to the contemporary revival
of virtue ethics. As it has become clearer in the light of
postmodernism that all thought is traditioned, Alasdair MacIntyre has
championed the Aristotelian tradition as the way forward today, not
least ethically. The major question is whether the mind in its grasp of
reality works anything like Aristotle's model. For all his helpful
recognition that there is an order to the world which can be
discovered, from a Christian perspective his master Plato provides an
important correction in his sense that to understand this world we need
a reference point outside of it.
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