Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scholar during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover various subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics and government. His views on physical science is what profoundly shaped the scholarship of medieval ages. Aristotle’s influence on subsequent generations is immensely deep. Only Plato can compare in his importance. Though Aristotle’s works were lost to the West for many centuries, they were preserved by Arab scholars and transmitted back to Europe in the Middle Ages.
Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At seventeen or eighteen years of age he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication.
๐ฏNATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Aristotle's "natural philosophy" spans a wide range of natural phenomena including those which are now covered by physics, biology and other natural sciences. According to Aristotle's terminology, "natural philosophy" is a branch of philosophy examining the phenomena of the natural world, and includes fields that would be contemporarily regarded as physics, biology and other natural sciences. Aristotle's work included virtually all facets of intellectual inquiry. Aristotle makes philosophy in the broad sense coextensive with reasoning, which he also would describe as "science". However, his use of the term science carries a different meaning than that covered by the term "scientific method". For Aristotle, "all science (dianoia) is either practical, poetical or theoretical" (Metaphysics 1025b25). His practical science includes ethics and politics; his poetical science means the study of fine arts including poetry; his theoretical science covers physics, mathematics and metaphysics.
Physics
๐ซFive elements
In his work On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle related each of the four elements proposed earlier by Empedocles(Empedocles was a renown Greek pre-Socratic philosopher. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements), Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, to two of the four sensible qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry. In the Empedoclean(relating to Empedocles) scheme, all matter was made of the four elements, in differing proportions. Aristotle's scheme added to the heavenly Aether( According to both ancient and medieval science, aether, also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere.), the divine substance of the heavenly spheres(The celestial spheres or heavenly spheres or celestial orbs, were the fundamental existence of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In all these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere), stars and planets.
๐ซMotion
Aristotle describes motion in two ways: "violent" or "unnatural motion", such as that of throwing a stone, in the Physics (254b10), and "natural motion", such as of a falling object. He says that all-natural things have a principle of motion and of stationaries. He also says that natural things are composed of stone, earth, or a mixture of the two. According to him, artificial products do not have the source of their own production. Aristotle also continues to describe how some people believe that the entire universe was created in a moment of spontaneity. This would imply the equation.
incorrect in modern physics.
Natural motion depends on the element like: the aether naturally moves in a circle around the heavens, while the 4 Empedoclean elements move vertically or down towards their natural resting places. In the Physics (215a25), Aristotle effectively states a quantitative law, that the speed, v, of a falling body is proportional (say, with constant c) to its weight, W, and inversely proportional to the density, ฯ, of the fluid in which it is falling:
๐ซFour causes
The four causes are elements of an influential principle in Aristotelian thought whereby explanations of change or movement are classified into four fundamental types of answer to one question "why?". Aristotle wrote, "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause." While there are cases in which classifying a "cause" is difficult, or in which "causes" might merge, Aristotle held that his four "causes" provided an analytical scheme of general applicability. Aitia is the word that Aristotle used to refer to the causal explanation, explanation, in philosophical traditional, been translated as "cause." This peculiar usage of the word "cause" is not that of everyday English language but rather, the translation of Aristotle's ฮฑแผฐฯฮฏฮฑ that is nearest to current ordinary language is explanation."
Material cause simply describes the material out of which something is composed. For eg. the material cause of a table is wood. It is not about any action.
The formal cause is the form, i.e., the arrangement of that matter. It tells us what a thing is. That is, a thing is determined by the definition, form, pattern, essence, whole, synthesis or archetype. It embraces the accounts of causes in terms of fundamental principles/general laws, as the whole (i.e., macrostructure) is the cause of its parts, a relationship known as the whole-part causation. The formal cause is the idea in the mind of the sculptor that brings the sculpture into being. A simple example of the formal cause is the mental image or idea that allows an artist, architect, or engineer to create his creativity.
The efficient cause is "the primary source", or that from which the change under consideration starts. It identifies 'what makes of what is made, and what causes change of what is changed' and so suggests all sorts of agents, nonliving or living, acting as the source of change or movement or rest. Representing the current understanding of causality as the relation of cause and effect, this covers the modern definitions of "cause" as either the agent or agency. In the case of two dominoes, when the first is knocked, the second also falls over
The final cause (telos) is its purpose, the reason why a thing exists or is done which includes both purposeful and instrumental actions and activities. The final cause is the purpose or function that something is supposed to serve for. This covers modern ideas of motivating causes or determination. In case of living things, it implies adaptation to a particular way of life.
๐ซOptics
๐ซChance and spontaneity
Aristotle made a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a particular thing. For example, a chair can be made of wood or metal, but this is accidental to its being a chair: that is, it is still a chair regardless of the material from which it is being made. To put this in technical terms, an accident is a property which has no necessary connection to the essence or property of the thing being described. To take another example, all bachelors are unmarried: this is the necessary or essential property of what it means to be a bachelor and a particular bachelor may have brown hair, but this would be a property particular to that individual, and with respect to his bachelorhood it would be an accidental property. Such distinction is independent: even if for some reason all the unmarried men with non-brown hair were killed, and every single existent bachelor had brown hair, the property of having brown hair would still be accidental since it would still be logically possible for a bachelor to have hair of another color as well. The nine kinds of accidents according to Aristotle are quantity, quality, relation, habitus, time, location, situation (or position), action, and passion ("being acted on"). Together with "substance", these nine kinds of accidents constitute the ten fundamental categories of Aristotle's ‘ontology’(the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming, and reality. It includes the questions of how entities are grouped into basic categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level). Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas(an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, Doctor of the Church theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism) has employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating the theology(the study of the nature of God and religious belief) of the Eucharist(the Christian service, ceremony, or sacrament commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed), particularly the transubstantiation(This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit) of bread and wine into body and blood. According to which, the accidents (or species) of the appearance of bread and wine do not change, but the substance changes from bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ.
๐ซAstronomy
In astronomy, Aristotle refuted Democritus's(an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe) claim that the Milky Way was made up of "those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun's rays," pointing out correctly that if "the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then... the sun shines on all the stars and the earth screens none of them."
๐ซGeology
Aristotle was one of the first people to record any geological observations ever. He stated that geological change was too slow to be observed in one person's lifetime. The geologist Charles Lyell noted that Aristotle has described such change, including "lakes that had dried up" and "deserts that had become watered by rivers", giving as examples the growth of the Nile delta since the time of Homer, and "the upheaving of one of the Aeolian islands, previous to a volcanic eruption.”
Aristotle's biology is grounded in a systematic observation and collection of data, mainly zoological, embodied in Aristotle's books on the science. Many of his observations were made during his stay on the island of Lesbos, including his descriptions of the marine biology of the Pyrrha lagoon, now the Gulf of Kalloni. His theory is based on his concept of form, which derives from Plato's Forms. The theory describes five major biological processes, which are metabolism(the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life), thermoregulation(ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different), information processing, embryogenesis(the formation and development of an embryo), and inheritance. Each was defined in some detail, in some cases sufficient to enable modern biologists to create mathematical models of the mechanisms described. Aristotle's method, too, resembled the style of science used by modern biologists when exploring a new area, with systematic data collection, discovery of patterns, and inference of possible causal explanations from these. He did not perform experiments, but made observations of living animals and carried out dissections. He named some 500 species of bird, mammal, and fish; and he distinguished dozens of insects and other invertebrates. He describes the internal anatomy of over a hundred animals, and dissected around 35 of these.
Aristotle, building upon the work of the earlier philosophers and their studies into mind, reasoning and thought, wrote the first known text in the history of psychology, called the Para Psyche meaning 'About the Mind.' In this landmark work, he laid out the first tenets of the study of reasoning that would determine the direction of the history of psychology; many of his proposals continue to influence modern psychologists even now. In the book, The Definition of Psyche, as was common at that time, he used 'mind' and 'soul' interchangeably, with the Ancient Greek philosophers feeling no need to make no distinction between the two. At this period, apart from courtship with Atheism from Theodorus, Greek philosophers took the existence of divine influence as given. Only Socrates really questioned whether human behaviour and the need to be a 'good person' was about seeking personal happiness rather than
soothing a divine will.
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