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From Myth to Mind
December 14, 1998
Plato vs. Aristotle/Aristotle & the Middle Ages
Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics
I. Book Alpha: The Theory of Explanation
1. The Development of Theoretical Knowledge [3 - 6]
a. Why does Aristotle say that the sense of sight is preferable to the other senses?
b. In what way does the opening paragraph of the Metaphysics differ from the Platonic concept of knowledge?
c. What distinguishes experience from sense, and how does experience develop into an art?
d. What distinguishes 'men of experience' from 'experts'?
e. What demonstrates that a person does, in fact, know a particular thing, according to Aristotle?
f. Why were the Egyptian priests able to develop mathematical arts first?
2. The Nature and Goal of Wisdom [6 - 9]
a. What makes a wise person wise, according to Aristotle?
b. What was it that is thought to have led the first to philosophize?
c. Why is the 'lover of myth' also a 'lover of wisdom' ?
d. How does Aristotle define a 'free' individual?
e. What is the goal of the metaphysician's search?
3. Early Views of Materials, Movement, and Good [9 - 12]
a. When can we claim to know a thing?
b. What are the four causes?
c. What were the limitations of the early Presocratic philosophers ?
d. How did Anaxagoras progress beyond Thales, Anaximenes & Heraclitus?
4. Inadequate Uses of Material and Efficient Factors [12 - 15]
a. How did Empedocles develop the doctrine of Parmenides?
b. What two basic types of explanation did they use?
5. Pythagorean and Parmenidean Principles [15 - 19]
a. According to Aristotle, what do all the Presocratic philosophers have in common (regarding first principles)?
b. Why does Aristotle consider the Pythagoreans to be in error?
6. Platonist Material and Formal Explanations [19 - 21]
a. Why did Socrates think it was impossible to find common definitions for things of the senses?
b. What, according to Plato's Socrates, is the relation between the concept and the object of the senses?
c. How did Plato adapt Pythagorean language in his doctrine of Ideas ?
d. How does Plato's concept of number differ from the Pythagoreans?
e. Why is sex an "analogue of form and matter"?
7. Explanation as Material, Efficient, Formal & Final [21 - 23]
a. What mistake do philosophers make when they speak of the good of things in terms of 'mind' and 'love'?
8. Critique of Early Philosophies [23 - 26]
9. Critique of Doctrine of Ideas [26 - 33]
10.Conclusion of the Historical Survey of Explanations [34]
II. On Aristotle
"Aristotle, the most eminent representative of the Realist school of philosophy in the history of Western thought, is an essential source for what the Greco-Roman tradition has termed wisdom. A Greek philosopher, logician, and scientist, he, perhaps more than any other thinker, has characterized the orientation and content of all that is termed Western civilization. Aristotle was the author of an intellectual system that, through the centuries, became the support and vehicle for both medieval Christian and Islamic Scholastic philosophy. His chief accomplishment, however, has been the establishment of the basis for logical thought; i.e., that collection of methodological rules that enables discourse (logos ) to achieve the greatest coherence and consequently the highest degree of effectiveness. An organizer as well as a classifier, he identified the categories that structure man's language and thought. More than his chief mentor, Plato, he understood the need to define language and to use it as a creative instrument (organon ) of thought capable of an ordered structure and, therefore, of conferring its own inner law upon nature. An encyclopedic thinker, he was able, on the one hand, to recognize the distinct kinds of knowledge, making contributions to specific disciplines, and on the other hand to perceive the overall unity of discourse that the forms of knowledge generate. The effect was to lay the groundwork for the evolution of empirical science and of speculative thought. Despite the limitations and imperfections now recognized in this achievement --- e.g., not until the turn of the 20th century could the development of mathematics have made comprehensive modal and symbolic logic possible ---Aristotle's thought has molded the subsequent systematization of knowledge. Although the abstract area of his thinking, that of metaphysics, has not always been well understood, Aristotle nonetheless has shown the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being, thus exposing the incomplete nature of every intellectual synthesis. He also exposed the qualified nature of any system of thought and the irreducibility of thought and existence to purely scientific technique with its analysis of the world of objects."
---Anselm H. Amadio, from "Aristotle" entry in The Encyclopaedia Britannica [Macropaedia, Vol. I: 1162-1171], Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1977.