Aristotle’s Philosophy: A New Approach to Reality and Nature
Aristotle vs. Platonism
Aristotle spent 17 years at Plato’s Academy, where he spent nearly 20 years learning the doctrines of Plato. These doctrines were purely theoretical and used mathematics as a model of knowledge. In fact, Plato’s theory of knowledge excludes experience. Plato distinguished between science and opinion, that is, between intellectual understanding and the sensitive, rejecting the value of experience for knowledge.
It is clear that Aristotle adopted many of Plato’s views, but he also adopted his own perspectives, rejecting some of Plato’s most important theories. Like Plato, Aristotle accepted the idea that in things, or entities, we can distinguish between appearance and essence. The essence is a form, which Plato called an “idea,” and it can be known through reason.
However, Aristotle disagreed with the existence of a separate world in which ideas live on their own. For Aristotle, there are ideas and forms, but they are always united with matter. Aristotle also rejected the idea of the immortality of the soul. The soul is the idea of the body, but it is created and destroyed with the body. As a result, he also rejected the idea that knowing is remembering. If the source of knowledge is not only remembering, then, for Aristotle, knowledge comes first through the senses.
In fact, Aristotle was originally a Platonist. His subsequent rejection of Platonism also had to do with issues and problems within the Academy. First, there were the theoretical problems caused by the theory of ideas. In the later period when Aristotle was at the Academy, the Pythagorean trend that tended to reduce everything, including ideas, to numbers, was more interested in quantification.
Aristotle was interested in those aspects of reality that can be quantified. Evidently, one can, in principle, study the properties of the quantifiable without recourse to experience, but one cannot analyze the quantifiable without experience.
Theory of Nature: Hylomorphism (Matter and Form)
Each discipline has its own object, just as metaphysics questions being as any entity. In substance, what makes it what it is, is form. For Aristotle, the form of something is its essence. Not everything that is in the substance is essential. What is not essential, Aristotle called “accident.” In reality, the form or essence is equivalent to the species, that is, the kind of thing it is. Matter is that from which a substance is made.
Theory of Nature: Hylomorphism and Accidents
Accidents can be grouped, from the standpoint of linguistic analysis, in the following sense: seeing possible ways of preaching about any substance in its function as subject. For Aristotle, it is those that can be said of each thing. Every proposition or sentence has a certain correspondence with reality, and in this sense, it can be true or false. A concept can never be true or false; the only thing to be is the attribution of a predicate to a subject.
If we do not understand these two terms, it is absolutely impossible to explain what the distinction of change is. The distinction Aristotle makes is between absolute non-being and relative non-being. Absolute non-being involves a total impossibility. For Aristotle, a relative non-being is equivalent to being in potency. Thus, he defines change as the passage from potency to act.
Aristotle’s Physics (Theory of Nature, Explanation of Change)
Physics, for Aristotle, is physis, that is, nature. Nature is the eternal principle of change, both in nature and the cosmos. Nature itself is the essence of natural things.
Principles or Rationale for Change or Movement
The Aristotelian idea of change can only be understood in the context of a teleological conception that all things tend toward certain ends, which Aristotle identifies with perfection. Deprivation is something lacking in the sense that something is an end in itself, meaning, for example, that a teenager is not an adult. Deprivation is a way of expressing how we tend toward something, how that is achieved or is achieved through change. The subject or substratum of change is always, for Aristotle, matter.
From here, Aristotle defines what change is: the transition from potency to act. The concepts of potency and act are related to those of form and matter. For Aristotle, potency lies in the matter, and act is in the form. Aristotle generally understood that the subject is always somewhat passive and active.
Types of Change
- Substantial Change: A substance is created or destroyed.
- Accidental Change: The substance remains, but some variation is created accidentally. This, in turn, differs in three types:
- Quantity: Increases or decreases.
- Quality: Some property varies.
- Place: Rearrangement.
Causes of Change
- Material Cause: That from which something is made.
- Formal Cause: The essence of the thing, that is, what it is.
- Efficient Cause: What causes or produces the change.
- Final Cause: The objective pursued by the change. It is what guides and directs the natural substances.
In natural substances, the form is both the efficient and final cause, that is, it is the form that is the principle of activity and contains the activity. In modern scientific explanation, there are only efficient causes, with one exception: in biology. Hermeneutics only uses the final cause.
According to Aristotelian physics, everything takes its natural place according to the material it is made of. Aristotelian physics also states that everything that moves is moved by another, though this can be interpreted in different ways. In a general sense, any change in anything is moved by another.