Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Aristotle was a pupil of Plato and was a tutor to Alexander the Great. 

Aristotle's writings covered a range of topics including logic, physics, biology, zoology, ethics, politics, economics, psychology and metaphysics. From Aristotle's admirers, we learn that he was a good speaker, a generous man and an inspiring teacher; his enemies tell us he was 'spindle-shanked', arrogant and rather too fond of fashion. 

Although Aristotle loved Plato, he rejected Plato's theory of Forms. He did not believe there were these two different realms, and he refused to accept that true knowledge does not belong in the empirical world. Aristotle was an empiricist and thought that it is through our experience that we come to understand things. 

He argues that an abstract world of concepts, beyond space and time, gives us nothing to talk about or learn about. There is no evidence for it's existence. All we can really know is here, in the world around us, and our experience through our sense is the only way in which we can get reliable facts. 

For Aristotle, the 'form' of something was not some kind of abstract Ideal, as Plato had believed, but was found within the item itself. The 'form' of an object can be readily percieved with the senses.

Aristotle used the word 'matter' to mean the stuffy of which something was made. E.g. a chaor's matter is wood and its form is the structure of the chair itself. He also wondered whether something could have matter but no form and he concluded that it could. There can be prime matter, or 'stuff' that has no particular form, it is not organised into any particular structure. He also raised the question if there could be a substance with form but no matter, and he concluded that this is God. 

Aristotle's Four Causes (Theory of causality)

• 1-Material cause- answers the Q 'what is it made of?' e.g. the material cause of the chair is the wood. But this material is not enough on its own to make the object whatever it is. Material is necessary but it does not give us the whole answer.
• 2- Efficient cause- the agent which brings something about, answers the question ''how does it come into being?'' 
• 3- Formal cause- the characteristics that make an object fit into whatever category it fits into. Provides the form. Answers the Q '' what are it's characteristics?''
• 4- Final cause- most important aspect of Aristotle's thinking, he believed objects have an ultimate reason for their existence (Telos). Answers the Q ''what's it's purpose?''

For Aristotle, the essence of an object was not just its material component parts, or its particular shape or characteristic, it also had a purpose, a function to perform. When something is doing what it was meant to dom or has developed into whatever it was supposed to develop into, it has achieved goodness. Purpose of an object is intrinsic.

According to A, all the different elements of nature have a purpose…