Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Knowledge, Causes, and Criticism
Aristotle’s Metaphysics: An Introduction
In the world, there are things worthy of faith, trust, something in which everything is based: the home and the homeland, parents and ancestors, siblings and friends, the wife. There is the historical background of the tradition in the mother tongue, in faith, in the work of thinkers, poets, and artists.
Aristotelian Metaphysics
“All men by nature desire to know,” a phrase that begins Aristotle’s Metaphysics. That desire to know culminates in the acquisition of wisdom, that is, for Aristotle, knowledge of the causes and principles of being.
Criticism of the Theory of Ideas
- The Aristotelian metaphysics is done as a reaction to Plato’s Theory of Ideas. It appears that Aristotle made the first criticism of the Theory of Ideas after abandoning the Academy when he started to shape his own philosophy.
- Aristotle would agree with Plato that there is a common element among all objects of the same class, the universal, the Idea, which causes us to apply the same label to all objects of the same genus, allowed by So universal that is real, but subsistent. The Theory of Ideas doubles for no reason the world of visible things, creating a parallel world that needs explanation.
- It is also not able to explain the movement of things, it was one of the reasons for its formulation. He concluded that the ideas are immobile and immutable, but that if they change.
- Aristotle considers that the Theory of Ideas is impossible since it provides a separation between the visible and the intelligible world. The ideas represent the essence of things, i.e., that by which things are what they are. Plato’s formulations to try to explain the relationship between ideas and things, the theories of participation and imitation, moreover, far from explaining the relationship are just metaphors.
- Aristotle insists on their shortcomings on the grounds of the “third man.” This refers to the existence of a third model of man to explain the similarity between actual men and the idea of man, and between individual men. Thus, we would chain to infinity the requirement of a standard model, which would lead to absurdity. On the other hand, things cannot come from ideas; however, is that an affirmation of the crucial Theory of Ideas, however, contradict Plato in saying that ideas are only causes copies of things, but not their efficient causes.
- In this Aristotelian criticism looming and the foundations of their own metaphysics. Unable to explain coherently what ideas the cause of the real propose the theory of four causes of being, and at the unreality of ideas, propose their theory of substance.
Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece
In Greece, everything is explained through myths and symbolic narratives. He paced philosophy of myth to logos “(logos = reason) or is replaced by the myth of man’s rational thinking. According Guithre was formed when in the minds of those questions arose about the events of the day. But the most momentous of the beginnings of philosophy is Plato’s and Aristotle’s theory of admiration, which for many people was very important that in the historical context that is placed, it was logical to relate it all a myth.