12. Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words. Unit 3 aristotle

Learn the topical vocabulary:

анализ	analysis	взаимосвязь	interconnection
всеобщее	general	догматизм	dogmatism
закон	law/rule	закономерность	regularity
мышление	thought/thinking	отражение	reflection
пространство	space	развитие	development/evolution
следствие	consequence	случайность	chance
ослабление	weakening	скомпрометировать	compromise
связи	ties/relations	чувственный	perceptible/sensible
ясность	clearness	воспроизведение	reproduction
представление	conception/ idea	суждение	judgement/opinion
цель	purpose/aim/objective	общество	society

Pre-text activities:

1. What viewpoint do you hold on the beginnings of the Universe and life?

2. Is the Universe finite?

1. Read and translate the text:

Aristotle (384-322BC) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor to Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death in 323, the political climate in Athens turned anti-Macedonian, and Aristotle went into voluntary exile. He died shortly thereafter, in 322.

At the age of 17 Aristotle went to Athens and studied at Plato’s Academy for twenty years, until the death of Plato in 348/7. Plato was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew Speusippus. Aristotle left Athens, traveling with another Academic, Xenocrates, who later succeeded Speusippus. There is no solid reason for supposing that Aristotle was disaffected with the Academy, or ever expected to become its head; both Speusippus and Xenocrates were senior to him. It was during this period that Aristotle acted as tutor to Alexander; he also married Pythias, adopted daughter of one of Aristotle’s fellow students at the Academy, Hermeias of Atarneus. Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 and founded his own “school”, the Lyceum or the ‘peripatetic school”.

Aristotle, like Plato, wrote dialogues. None of these, or other works he wrote “for publication”, have survived; there are quotations or paraphrases from these lost works in later authors, and such material constitutes collections of Aristotle’s “fragments”. Among the more important of the lost works are Eudemus, or On Soul, Statesman, On Poets, On Philosophy, On justice, On Contraries, On Ideas. Some of these works are datable, and most appear to have been published early in Aristotle’s career, while he was still in the Academy.

The first several books of the Aristotelian corpus – Categories, Prior Analytics, Topics – are commonly referred to as the “Organon” or “instrument’ of philosophizing. Aristotle’s categories are variously types of predication and kinds of being: the predicate term in “S” is “P” may indicate what S is, its “substance” – it is a man, a horse – or how much of it there is no one or another dimension, or one way or another in which it is related, where it is, when it is and so on. Alternatively, these terms give us different types of being; substances, quantities, qualities, relatives, places, times and so on. The Posterior Analytics goes back into the area of logic more broadly conceived; it concerns the analysis of knowledge. According to the analysis, exemplary knowledge is systematic, laid out in premise-and-proof form, almost always in syllogisms. Aristotle’s picture of mathematics was based on a pre-Euclidean axiomatization of “elements” about which we have no independent information: this is most unfortunate, since there is no plausible way of applying syllogistic to actual mathematical argument as we know it from Euclid on.

Aristotle’s “physics” in fact comprises all of what takes place in nature; his views on the soul and on biology as well as what is more conventionally regarded as “physics”.

Physics 1 is devoted to problems pertaining to change, and it is here that Aristotle introduces the tripartite analysis of change – involving form, matter (subject), and privation – that stays with him throughout the rest of his work. In II we encounter the famous “four causes”, known now by their scholastic titles: the “material”, “formal”, “efficient”, and “final” causes. “Cause” translates a word that meant, used in a law court, the “guilty” or “responsible” party. Aristotle is listing four sorts of thing that might be held responsible for something’s being the way it is. As an example consider a bronze statue. Taking the causes in the above order, you might ask what it is made of (bronze), or what sort of thing it is (a statue), or what initiated whatever changes brought it into being (its sculptor), or what it is for (decoration).

Books III and IV give analyses of motion, the unlimited (infinite), place, void and time. Aristotle’s procedure in each case is the same: he raises problems, discusses the views of others, and finally presents an analysis that solves the problems and explains the views he takes to be erroneous. Later books of the Physics deal with temporal and spatial continuity and with theology.

The treatise On Coming-to-Be and Passing-Away deals with the nature of such changes and ultimately with the four “so-called elements” earth, water, air and fire, which are not really elements since they undergo transformation into each other, but are still as simple as any material can get. It remains a disputed question whether this drives Aristotle to the notion of a characterless “prime matter” that provides the material continuant for such changes.

Aristotle’s treatment of the soul is that of a biologist: the soul is that aspect of an organism (including plants) that constitutes its capacity for performing the activities characteristic of the sort of life it leads. A plant has a soul that enables it to grow and reproduce; an animal one that enables it to do that much and also to move around and perceive; a human being has one that enables it to do all that as well as think. Aristotle seems to be suggesting that there is a sort of immortality accorded to this last aspect of soul, but it is not an immortality that gives much comfort, since it does not carry any memory with it; even if Aristotle is allowing that you can think of your soul surviving your death, he isn't allowing your soul remembers anything of your life.

The biggest difficulty is seeing how Aristotle might account for natural teleology. He cannot appeal to a cosmic designer; one of his favorite sayings ‘nature does nothing in vain”. Aristotle firmly rejects evolutionary explanations in the only form in which they were known to him: the universe not only has always existed and will always exist, it has been and will be just the way it is, with all its species of organisms.

Aristotle’s ethical views focus on happiness, or the good for men, and how to obtain it. Happiness is not here to be construed as a subjective feeling of well-being, but as human well-being itself. Aristotle explains the “human good” as “activity of the soul in accordance with excellence”: the realization of the capacities distinctive of human life, particularly contemplation and political activity.

Aristotle differs from Plato in the Republic in insisting that a minimum of external goods is a prerequisite for human well-being. But he rejects hedonism on the ground that pursuit of pleasure as a goal, rather than the activities in which one takes pleasure, is bound to be frustrated.

We are responsible for our actions, even when they emerge from our characters, which are settled relatively early in our lives: Aristotle appears to recognize no problem about the “freedom of the will”, unlike the Stoics and the Epicureans in the next generation of philosophers. The purpose of studying ethics is, he thinks, to make ourselves good, but Aristotle supposes that we already want to become good.

The account of excellence or virtue he offers locates each virtue in between two opposed vices: the simplest example is courage, which is a mean between the two opposed vices of cowardice and rashness. His notion of virtue as a mean is not an ethics of moderation as is sometimes supposed. He certainly recommends moderation, but as one virtue among others: a mean state between being self-indulgent and being “insensible”.

Looking at all the Aristotelian treatises, the ratio of influence to size in the case of the Poetics is the greatest: it is tiny but of enormous historical importance. Tragedy is defined in terms of the representation or imitation by actors in poetic speech of a serious action in its entirety, which by means of pity and fear achieves the catharsis of such emotions. Epic represents the same sort of things but in narration in greater length, and in a fixed verse-structure. Aristotle’s elaboration of both these forms of poetry represents a considerable advance: Aristotle initiates the idea that they have their own rules of construction and are not simply to be criticized on a moralizing basis.

Aristotle has been one of the most influential philosophers of all time, sometimes beneficially and sometimes harmfully. But had his successors been as critical of his views as he was of his predecessors’. The balance of benefit to harm would have been greater. Those who acquiesced in Aristotle’s wisdom without questioning it have only themselves to blame.