Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction

From the first to the sixth century AD, a sequence of scholarly commentators preserved his writings and revivified his thought. There was a second renewal of interest in Byzantium in the eighth century. Later, in the twelfth century, Aristotle came to Western Europe, where his texts were read by learned men and translated into Latin, and copies were widely disseminated and widely read. Aristotle was known, magisterially, as 'the Philosopher'. His thought was all- pervasive, and the half-hearted attempts by the Church to suppress his writings only confirmed their authority. For some four centuries Aristotle's philosophy and Aristotle's science ruled the West with virtually unchallenged sway.

An account of Aristotle's intellectual afterlife would be little less than a history of European thought.

Yet the generalities contain something of importance. Aristotle's first general account of the soul amounts to this: for a thing to have a soul is for it to be a natural organic body actually capable of functioning. The second general account explains what those functions are. Thus Aristotle's souls are not pieces of living things, nor are they bits of spiritual stuff placed inside physical bodies; rather, they are sets of powers, sets of capacities or faculties. Possessing a soul is like possessing a skill.

In Book VIII of the Physics Aristotle argues for the existence of a changeless source of change -- an 'unmoved mover' as it is normally called.
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What are we to make of all this? Some scholars take Aristotle's words at what seems to be their face value, and find living gods scattered throughout his writings -- he thus becomes a profoundly religious scientist. Other scholars dismiss Aristotle's use of the words 'god' and 'divine' as a façon de parler: the primary substances are divine only in the sense that other things are dependent upon them -- and Aristotle becomes a wholly secular thinker.
Neither of those two views is plausible. There is too much about gods in the treatises to permit us to discount Aristotle's theologizing as pious word play; and, on the other hand, Aristotle's gods are too abstract, remote, and impersonal to be regarded as the objects of religious worship. Rather, we might connect Aristotle's remarks about the divinity of the universe with the sense of wonderment which nature and its works produced in him.

Chapter 14
Aristotle's World-Picture

Aristotle was an industrious collector who amassed a prodigious quantity of information on a vast variety of topics. He was also an abstract thinker, whose philosophical ideas ranged wide. The two aspects of his intellectual activity were not kept in distinct mental compartments. On the contrary, Aristotle's scientific work and his philosophical investigations were the two halves of a unified intellectual outlook. Aristotle was a remarkable scientist and a profound philosopher, but it is as a philosopher-scientist that he excels. He was, according to an ancient aphorism, 'a scribe of nature who dipped his pen in thought'.

One of the terms which Aristotle recognizes as ambiguous is the term 'being' or 'existent'. Chapter 7 of Book V of the Metaphysics is given over to 'being'; and Book VII begins by observing that 'things are said to be in many senses, as we described earlier in our remarks on ambiguity; for being signifies what a thing is (that is, this so-and-so), and quality or quantity or each of the other things predicated in this way'. There are at least as many senses of 'being', then, as there are categories of beings.

Aristotle divided knowledge into three major classes: 'all thought is either practical or productive or theoretical'. The productive sciences are those concerned with the making of things -- cosmetics and farming, art and engineering. Aristotle himself had relatively little to say about productive knowledge. The Rhetoric and the Poetics are his only surviving exercises in that area. ( Poetics in Greek is 'poiêtikê', and that is the word translated as 'productive' in the phrase 'the productive sciences'.) The practical sciences are concerned with action, or more precisely with how we ought to act in various circumstances, in private and in public affairs. The Ethics and the Politics are Aristotle's chief contributions to the practical sciences.