ARISTOTLE - "Ille Philosophus" (The Philosopher) - A Thinking Genius

ARISTOTLE - “Ille Philosophus” (The Philosopher) - A Thinking Genius

          

 “Well begun is half done” is an Aristotle quote and it means any action begun well amount to accomplishing the task equal to half in the start itself or you said it a kick-start advantage.

A good man don’t have repentance or the past deeds don’t haunt him – an Aristotle Philosophy retold (bad men are full of repentance).  

Aristotle was the first person to use the term “Anthropology”.

 Aristotle the name means “the best purpose”.

Aristotle’s philosophy was his systematic concept of logic.   Aristotle’s philosophy not only provided man with a system of reasoning, but also touched upon ethics.  In Nichomachean Ethics, he prescribed a moral code of conduct for what he called “good living”.  Aristotle philosophy emphasized on logical reasoning. 

 

In Politics, Aristotle examined human behavior in the context of society and government.

Change was cyclical to Aristotle, like the cycle of water through evaporation, rain, rivers, oceans and deserts. He imagined an eternal universe without beginning or end  (alpha or omega), and this is the most basic difference between his work and that of both medieval and modern thinkers. He believed that the overall conditions of the world would never change.

Aristotle was a great Greek Philosopher and Scientist who was born in the Macedonian city of Stagira, Greece in BC 384 and died in Chalcis, Greece in BC 322 – aged 62 years. 

Alexander the Great was a student of Aristotle.  Aristotle tutored Alexander at the young age and sowed the seeds of wisdom in him.   Alexander has become the greatest warrior or military leader of all time to have been conquered almost the whole world.  He was undisputedly the greatest emperor the world has ever seen.

Aristotle (right in the painting) was educated from Plato’s Athens Academy (a Raphael’s painting) and Socrates was his predecessor.

Biography _ 

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, a small town on the northern coast of Greece that was once a seaport. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II. Although Nicomachus died when Aristotle was just a young boy, Aristotle remained closely affiliated with and influenced by the Macedonian court for the rest of his life. Little is known about his mother, Phaestis; she is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young.

                                         “Personal beauty is a greater recommendation

                                                      than any letter of reference.”  -     Aristotle

After Aristotle’s father died, Proxenus of Atarneus, who was married to Aristotle’s older sister, Arimneste, became Aristotle’s guardian until he came of age. When Aristotle turned 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to pursue a higher education. At the time, Athens was considered the academic center of the universe. In Athens, Aristotle enrolled in Plato’s Academy, Greek’s premier learning institution, and proved an exemplary scholar. Aristotle maintained a relationship with Greek philosopher Plato, himself a student of Socrates, and his academy for two decades. Plato died in 347 B.C. Because Aristotle had disagreed with some of Plato’s philosophical treatises, Aristotle did not inherit the position of director of the academy, as many imagined he would.

                “Pleasure in the job put perfection in the work” - Aristotle

After Plato died, Aristotle’s friend Hermias, king of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, invited Aristotle to court. During his three-year stay in Mysia, Aristotle met and married his first wife, Pythias, Hermias’ niece. Together, the couple had a daughter, Pythias, named after her mother.

In 338 B.C., Aristotle went home to Macedonia to start tutoring King Phillip II’s son, the then 13-year-old Alexander the Great. Phillip and Alexander both held Aristotle in high esteem and ensured that the Macedonia court generously compensated him for his work.

                        “Dignity consists not in posessing of honors,

                          but in the consciences that we deserve them”  - Aristotle

In 335 B.C., after Alexander had succeeded his father as king and conquered Athens, Aristotle went back to the city. In Athens, Plato’s Academy, now run by Xenocrates, was still the leading influence on Greek thought. With Alexander’s permission, Aristotle started his own school in Athens, called the Lyceum. On and off, Aristotle spent most of the remainder of his life working as a teacher, researcher and writer at the Lyceum in Athens. Like Plato’s Academy, the Lyceum attracted students from throughout the Greek world and developed a curriculum centered on its founder’s teachings. In accordance with Aristotle’s principle of surveying the writings of others as part of the philosophical process, the Lyceum assembled a collection of manuscripts that comprised one of the world’s first great libraries.

Aristotle wrote treatises covering a vast range of philosophical thought, from biology, physics, logic, science, and metaphysics to ethics, morality, aesthetics, and politics.

Aristotle school in Mieza

Because Aristotle was known to walk around the school grounds while teaching, his students, forced to follow him, were nicknamed the “Peripatetics,” meaning “people who travel about.” Lyceum members researched subjects ranging from science and math to philosophy and politics, and nearly everything in between. Art was also a popular area of interest. Members of the Lyceum wrote up their findings in manuscripts. In so doing, they built the school’s massive collection of written materials, which by ancient accounts was credited as one of the first great libraries.

In the same year that Aristotle opened the Lyceum, his wife Pythias died. Soon after, Aristotle embarked on a romance with a woman named Herpyllis, who hailed from his hometown of Stagira. According to some historians, Herpyllis may have been Aristotle’s slave, granted to him by the Macedonia court. They presume that he eventually freed and married her. Regardless, it is known that Herpyllis bore Aristotle children, including one son named Nicomachus, after Aristotle’s father. Aristotle is believed to have named his famed philosophical work Nicomachean Ethics in tribute to his son.

When Aristotle’s former student Alexander the Great died suddenly in 323 B.C., the pro-Macedonian government was overthrown, and in light of anti-Macedonia sentiment, Aristotle was charge with impiety. To avoid being prosecuted, he left Athens and fled to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, where he would remain until his death. 

In 322 BC, at age 62, Aristotle died of a digestive ailment.

Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts, including biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology, and zoology. He was the founder of formal logic, devising for it a finished system that for centuries was regarded as the sum of the discipline; and he pioneered the study of zoology, both observational and theoretical, in which some of his work remained unsurpassed until the 19th century. But he is, of course, most outstanding as a philosopher. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of science continue to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate.

Most moral virtues, and not just courage, are to be understood as falling at the mean between two accompanying vices. His list may be represented by the following table:

Vice of Deficiency	Virtuous Mean	Vice of Excess
Cowardice	Courage	Rashness
Insensibility	Temperance	Intemperance
Illiberality	Liberality	Prodigality
Pettiness	Munificence	Vulgarity
Humble-mindedness	High-mindedness	Vaingloriness
Want of Ambition	Right Ambition	Over-ambition
Spiritlessness	Good Temper	Irascibility
Surliness	Friendly Civility	Obsequiousness
Ironical Depreciation	Sincerity	Boastfulness
Boorishness	Wittiness	Buffoonery
Shamelessness	Modesty	Bashfulness
Callousness	Just Resentment	Spitefulness

The Greek philosopher Aristotle made significant and lasting contributions to nearly every aspect of human knowledge, from logic to biology to ethics and aesthetics. Though overshadowed in classical times by the work of his teacher Plato, from late antiquity through the Enlightenment, Aristotle’s surviving writings were incredibly influential.

Although Aristotle was not technically a scientist by today’s definitions, science was among the subjects that he researched at length during his time at the Lyceum. Aristotle believed that knowledge could be obtained through interacting with physical objects. He concluded that objects were made up of a potential that circumstances then manipulated to determine the object’s outcome. He also recognized that human interpretation and personal associations played a role in our understanding of those objects.

Aristotle’s research in the sciences included a study of biology. He attempted, with some error, to classify animals into genera based on their similar characteristics. He further classified animals into species based on those that had red blood and those that did not. The animals with red blood were mostly vertebrates, while the “bloodless” animals were labeled cephalopods. Despite the relative inaccuracy of his hypothesis, Aristotle’s classification was regarded as the standard system for hundreds of years.

       

Marine biology was also an area of fascination for Aristotle. Through dissection, he closely examined the anatomy of marine creatures. In contrast to his biological classifications, his observations of marine life, as expressed in his books, are considerably more accurate.

As evidenced in his treatise Meteorology, Aristotle also dabbled in the earth sciences. By meteorology, Aristotle didn’t simply mean the study of weather. His more expansive definition of meteorology included “all the affectations we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affectations of its parts.” In Meteorology, Aristotle identified the water cycle and discussed topics ranging from natural disasters to astrological events.

He discusses winds, earthquakes (which he thought were caused by underground winds), thunder, lightning, rainbows, and meteors, comets, and the Milky Way (which he thought were atmospheric phenomena). Although many of his views on the Earth were controversial at the time, they were readopted and popularized during the late Middle Ages.

One of the main focuses of Aristotle’s philosophy was his systematic concept of logic. Aristotle’s objective was to come up with a universal process of reasoning that would allow man to learn every conceivable thing about reality. The initial process involved describing objects based on their characteristics, states of being and actions. In his philosophical treatises, Aristotle also discussed how man might next obtain information about objects through deduction and inference. To Aristotle, a deduction was a reasonable argument in which “when certain things are laid down, something else follows out of necessity in virtue of their being so.” His theory of deduction is the basis of what philosophers now call a syllogism, a logical argument where the conclusion is inferred from two or more other premises of a certain form.

In his book Prior Analytics, Aristotle explains the syllogism as “a discourse in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from the things supposed results of necessity because these things are so.” Aristotle defined the main components of reasoning in terms of inclusive and exclusive relationships. These sorts of relationships were visually grafted in the future through the use of Venn diagrams.

  

             “Most people would rather give than get affection”  - Aristotle

Aristotle’s philosophy not only provided man with a system of reasoning, but also touched upon ethics. In Nichomachean Ethics, he prescribed a moral code of conduct for what he called “good living.” He asserted that good living to some degree defied the more restrictive laws of logic, since the real world poses circumstances that can present a conflict of personal values. That said, it was up to the individual to reason cautiously while developing his or her own judgment.

                                                   
                                                    Aristotle and Plato in Athens Academy

Aristotle wrote an estimated 200 works of which only 31 survive, most of his works are in the form of notes and manuscript drafts. They consist of dialogues, records of scientific observations and systematic works. His student Theophrastus reportedly looked after Aristotle’s writings and later passed them to his own student Neleus, who stored them in a vault to protect them from moisture until they were taken to Rome and used by scholars there.

Aristotle’s major writings on logic include Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics. In them, he discusses his system for reasoning and for developing sound arguments.

Aristotle’s written work also discussed the topics of matter and form. In his book Metaphysics, he clarified the distinction between the two. To Aristotle, matter was the physical substance of things, while form was the unique nature of a thing that gave it its identity.

Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics are Aristotle’s major treatises on the behavior and judgment that constitute “good living.” In Politics, Aristotle examined human behavior in the context of society and government.

Aristotle also composed a number of works on the arts, including Rhetoric, and science, including On the Heavens, which was followed by On the Soul, in which Aristotle moves from discussing astronomy to examining human psychology. Aristotle’s writings about how people perceive the world continue to underlie many principles of modern psychology.

In 322 B.C., just a year after he fled to Chalcis to escape prosecution under charges of impiety, Aristotle contracted a disease of the digestive organs and died. In the century following his passing, his works fell out of use, but were revived during the first century. Over time, they came to lay the foundation of more than seven centuries of philosophy. Solely regarding his influence on philosophy, Aristotle’s work influenced ideas from late antiquity all the way through the Renaissance. Aristotle’s influence on Western thought in the humanities and social sciences is largely considered unparalleled, with the exception of his teacher Plato’s contributions, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him. The two-millennia-strong academic practice of interpreting and debating Aristotle’s philosophical works continues to endure.

 

Aristotle’s Works

It was at the Lyceum that Aristotle probably composed most of his approximately 200 works. In style, his known works are dense and almost jumbled, suggesting that they were lecture notes for internal use at his school. The surviving works of Aristotle are grouped into four categories. The “Organon” is a set of writings that provide a logical toolkit for use in any philosophical or scientific investigation. Next come Aristotle’s theoretical works, most famously his treatises on animals, cosmology, the “Physics” (a basic inquiry about the nature of matter and change) and the “Metaphysics” (a quasi-theological investigation of existence itself).

Third are Aristotle’s so-called practical works, notably the “Nicomachean Ethics” and “Politics,” both deep investigations into the nature of human flourishing on the individual, familial and societal levels. Finally, his “Rhetoric” and “Poetics” examine the finished products of human productivity, including what makes for a convincing argument and how a well-wrought tragedy can instill cathartic fear and pity.

However, even today Aristotle’s work remains a significant starting point for any argument in the fields of logic, aesthetics, political theory and ethics.

Members of the Lyceum conducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of interest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric, political history, government and political theory, rhetoric, and the arts. In all these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according to some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of antiquity.

Cicero's observation that if Plato's prose was silver, Aristotle's was a flowing river of gold.  Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of Latin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded critic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and Greek.

Significantly, Aristotle's tri-fold division of the sciences makes no mention of logic. Although he did not use the word ‘logic’ in our sense of the term, Aristotle in fact developed the first formalized system of logic and valid inference.

(i) The theoretical sciences include prominently what Aristotle calls first philosophy, or metaphysics as we now call it, but also mathematics, and physics, or natural philosophy. Physics studies the natural universe as a whole, and tends in Aristotle's hands to concentrate on conceptual puzzles pertaining to nature rather than on empirical research; but it reaches further, so that it includes also a theory of causal explanation and finally even a proof of an unmoved mover thought to be the first and final cause of all motion. Many of the puzzles of primary concern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to philosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural scientists. They include, as a small sample, Zeno's paradoxes of motion, puzzles about time, the nature of place, and difficulties encountered in thought about the infinite.

Natural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including biology, botany, and astronomical theory. Most contemporary critics think that Aristotle treats psychology as a sub-branch of natural philosophy, because he regards the soul (psuchê) as the basic principle of life, including all animal and plant life. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is scanty. It is instructive to note that earlier periods of Aristotelian scholarship thought this controversial, so that, for instance, even something as innocuous-sounding as the question of the proper home of psychology    in Aristotle's division of the sciences   ignited a multi-decade  debate in the   Renaissance. 

Fused and reconciled with Christian doctrine into a philosophical system known as Scholasticism, Aristotelian philosophy became the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church.

(ii) Practical sciences are less contentious, at least as regards their range. These deal with conduct and action, both individual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with theoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less obviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation of products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and ethics fall under this branch.

(iii) Finally, then, the productive sciences are mainly crafts aimed at the production of artefacts, or of human productions more broadly construed. The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theater, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to various forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political assemblies.

Aristotle’s major works are –

• Organon
• Categories
• De Interpretatione
• Prior Analytics
• Posterior Analytics
• Topics
• Sophistical Refutations
• Theoretical Sciences
• Physics
• Generation and Corruption
• De Caelo
• Metaphysics
• De Anima
• Parva Naturalia
• History of Animals
• Parts of Animals
• Movement of Animals
• Meteorology
• Progression of Animals
• Generation of Animals
• Practical Sciences
• Nicomachean Ethics
• Eudemian Ethics
• Magna Moralia
• Politics

·         Productive Science

               Rhetoric

               Poetics

 

Bertrand Russell
British logician and philosopher 

(1872 -  1970)

           

                      

 

When we discuss about world famous philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Socrates it becomes inevitable to write a brief note about Bertrand Russell, the 20^th century’s Nobel Prize winner British Logician and Philosopher.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (born May 18, 1872, Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales—died Feb. 2, 1970,  Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth Aged 98 years).

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

                                                                                                                           

                                                                                          
                          

                                                      

Russell, like Pythagoras and Plato before him, believed that there existed a realm of truth that, unlike the messy contingencies of the everyday world of sense-experience, was immutable and eternal. 

It is more than obvious that you need to write a separate Blog about Bertrand Russell.  Russell’s works, life and times recommends an extensive reading.

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” – Bertrand Russell 

Aristotle was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosopher and a thinking genius.