2008-2-PHI130.Week05

PHI130 Week 5: Aristotle

Lecture 9: Aristotle's physics

Final week on Greek philosophy. We started with the founders Thales and Phythagoras, then the "real" founder Socrates. Then two weeks on Plato, the first great metaphysician. We looked at Plato's Doctrine of Forms, concerning reality and knowledge; then at his metaphysical theory of love. This week we look at the second great metaphysician: Aristotle. Aristotle spent ten years in Plato's Academy, and Aristotle later started his own school, the Lyceum.

Critique of Plato's doctrine of forms

Aristotle was heavily influenced by Plato, his teacher, but had a different outlook. Aristotle was critical of Plato, and defined metaphysical reality differently. We look at what Aristotle thought "ultimate reality" is, because that's what we're concerned with in "mind, meaning, and metaphysics". 'Mind' concerns knowledge, and 'meaning' is...?

Aristotle's critique of Plato leads directly into his own philosophy. Aristotle has a number of objections to Plato's Doctrine of Forms, the most famous being the "third man" argument:

Aristotle shows the three "beds" from Book X of Plato's Republic all have the same name, thus an unifying concept. Plato draws out the instance (empirical) and class (ideal) concepts from the beds. Aristotle points out that the individual and the classified "bed" each bear the same label. Thus there must be one notion above the classes of beds that gives the beds their name. Then we have the empirical bed, the ideal bed, and the notion comprising each. This latter notion has no ideal itself unless we invoke a fourth notion that is the ideal of the first three notions, and so on, ad infinitum.

Readings

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta, sections 6, 7 and 8.

Aristotle, Physics

Aristotle, Physics, II, 3, 194b15-195a3; III, 1, 200b10-201b15.

Shapin, Scientific Revolution

S. Shapin, The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.14-29

Reading Questions

Aristotle, extract from the Metaphysics

• What is Aristotle's distinction between actuality and potentiality?
• What is Aristotle's distinction between an action done for the sake of some end outside itself and true or complete actions?
• What does Aristotle mean by saying that actuality is prior to potentiality:
  • in formula?
  • In time?
  • In substance?

Aristotle, extract from the Physics

Aristotle identifies four causes, which can be thought of as four ways we might explain why a certain thing is as it is.

• Give an example of each of Aristotle's four senses of "cause":
  • material cause
  • formal cause
  • cause of change / efficient cause
  • final cause
• Give examples of the four kinds of motion or change identified by Aristotle:
  • alteration
  • increase and decrease
  • coming to be and passing away
  • locomotion

S. Shapin, extract from The Scientific Revolution

• Why were Galileo's views a challenge to Aristotelian physics?
• Why were Galileo's contemporaries unwilling to accept that the sun was 'blemished'?
• What did Ptolemy's geocentric system have in common with ancient Greek views of nature (such as that expressed in Plato's Timaeus?