Aristotelianism
Thinking each being through what it can accomplish: a tradition for which a is built through the exercise of reason and the virtues.
335 BCE – 1274
A tradition stemming from the school founded at the Lyceum in Athens around 335 BCE, where his disciples, the Peripatetics, taught while walking about. Trained under but breaking with him, Aristotle built philosophy's first encyclopaedic system, from logic to biology, out of the patient observation of the sensible world rather than the contemplation of a realm of Ideas. After a long eclipse, his work was commented on and extended by in the Arab-Muslim world, then absorbed into Christianity by : Aristotelianism became the backbone of medieval and the dominant authority of the universities, until modern science challenged its finalism. Its logic, its virtue ethics and its metaphysical vocabulary still run through Western thought.
To explain a thing is to state what it is for: every being tends toward its proper end, and nothing in nature is in vain.
The soul is the of the living body, not a substance housed within it: the human being is the inseparable unity of a soul and a body.
Virtue is neither a calculation nor obedience to a rule, but a between excess and deficiency, discerned by .
A thing's essence is an , not a separate Idea: form exists only in individual substances.
The supreme good is , an activity of the soul in accord with virtue: humans flourish by exercising their proper function, reason.
Justification
That several men are called « man » presupposes a real universal, not a mere name: science bears on it. But to make it a separate Idea, in 's manner, raises the third-man objection, for one would then need a further form to explain what the sensible man and Man-himself have in common, and so on without end. Aristotelianism therefore keeps the realism of universals while rendering them : genus and species exist only in individuals, and it is the intellect that abstracts them. Neither nominalism nor subsisting Ideas.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Z; Categories
Justification
Against Platonic innatism, Aristotelianism holds that all knowledge begins in sense perception: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. Induction rises from perceived particulars to universal principles, yielding a moderately empiricist position, the intellect remaining required to grasp essences.
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 19 · Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 4-8
Justification
The Aristotelian definition of truth is the paradigm of correspondence: thought is true when it accords with what is in the thing, a formula scholasticism would restate as the adequation of intellect and thing.
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.Metaphysics, IV (Gamma).7 (1011b)
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Γ (book IV), 7 · Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, q. 1
Justification
Aristotelianism is in the noble sense: genuine science, epistēmē, is demonstrative knowledge proceeding from indemonstrable first principles, themselves grasped with certainty by the intellect. Scientific knowledge bears on the necessary and the universal, which excludes doubt about its foundations, even as acknowledges the inherent uncertainty of the domain of action.
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I, 2 and II, 19
Justification
The argument proceeds from the proper function: as the flute-player's good lies in performing his function well, the human good lies in the activity specific to humans, the exercise of reason, which neither plant nor animal shares. The sovereign good thus cannot be pleasure, which every beast pursues, against ; nor an external good like honour, which depends on others. It is , an activity of the soul in accord with virtue: an active fulfilment, not a possessed state, unfolding across a whole life and requiring also goods of body and fortune.
The good of man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 (1098a)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7 · Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, qq. 1-5
Justification
Knowledge aims at the universal and the stable: there are indeed essences, that by which a thing is what it is, distinct from its accidental features. But to lodge those essences in a separate world, like 's Ideas, needlessly doubles reality and explains neither how the Idea makes the thing be nor where it resides. Aristotle therefore brings the back into the individual substance: it exists only as in this horse, this man. Essentialism is thus preserved without a dualism of worlds, which grounds knowledge of the sensible rather than turning away from it.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Z (book VII) · Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence
Justification
If the soul were a separate substance housed in the body, as for , the evident unity of the living thing would be unintelligible, and so would the question of why this soul animates this body. dissolves the difficulty: every substance is a compound of matter and form, and the soul is precisely the form, the actuality, of the organized body, as sight is the actuality of the eye. To ask whether soul and body are one, Aristotle concludes, is as idle as to ask it of the wax and its imprint: the human being is neither an imprisoned spirit nor a mere machine, but a single animated reality.
Aristotle, On the Soul, II
Justification
Aristotle forges the analysis of the voluntary act: voluntary is that whose principle (arche) lies in the agent who knows the circumstances, as opposed to what is done under constraint or through ignorance. Since the origin of our acts is in us, they are up to us (eph' hemin), and that is why we praise and blame: virtue and vice alike are voluntary. A stance of responsibility, with neither a deterministic system nor a metaphysical free will.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1-5
Justification
Desire is neither to be affirmed without restraint nor extinguished, but ordered by practical reason: the consists in desiring what one ought, when and as one ought. The temperate person has not abolished appetite but brought it into accord with deliberate choice, yielding a reasoned selection of desires rather than detachment or sheer affirmation.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 10-12
Justification
Aristotelianism rejects both asceticism and intemperance: pleasure is not the good, but it completes activity as beauty completes youth. Bodily pleasures are legitimate so long as they keep to the set by temperance, yielding a very moderate position, barely on the accepting side.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, 4-5 · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 10-11
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Justification
Aristotelianism holds pain and misfortune to be genuine evils, against Stoic indifference: happiness needs external goods, and great misfortunes can impair it. Suffering has no value in itself and should be avoided; but the courageous person endures it nobly when a good end demands it, without seeking or sacralizing it.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I and III
Justification
Aristotelianism holds death to be the natural end of the compound of soul and body: a real evil, which deprives of all goods, but to be faced with courage rather than fled or denied. Except for the intellect, whose eternity remains impersonal, nothing of the person survives: a lucid finitude, which grants death its gravity without making of it either a nothing or a passage.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III
Justification
The meaning of existence is teleological: since every being tends toward its proper end, human life finds its meaning in the actualization of its function, the life according to reason, whose summit is contemplative activity. Meaning is therefore neither wholly self-constructed nor absurd, but inscribed in the very nature of the human being.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, 7-8
Justification
One does not become just by knowing justice, against Socratic intellectualism, nor by following a rule that would hold identically for all: virtue is a stable disposition of character, acquired by habituation like a skill. Hence the : courage is not a fixed quantity but the point adjusted between cowardice and rashness, relative to us and varying with circumstance. No formula can settle it in advance; only , the practical reason of the experienced person, discerns it in the concrete case. This is why right action is a matter of situated judgement, not of calculation or obedience.
Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way the person of practical wisdom would determine it.Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6, 1106b-1107a
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6 · Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, qq. 55-67
Justification
Aristotelianism makes a theme of epieikeia, the equity that corrects the law where its generality renders it unjust in a particular case. Since no rule can anticipate every case, justice requires the discernment of , tilting the position toward the spirit rather than the letter.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V, 10
Justification
Far from a contractual artifice, the city is for Aristotelianism a natural reality: man is by nature a political animal, and only a god or a beast could live outside the city. The political community is the natural culmination of simpler communities, the household and then the village.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 2
Justification
The city is prior in nature to the individual, as the whole is to the part: in isolation the individual is not self-sufficient and cannot actualize a properly human end. This priority of the whole leans holist, without dissolving the individual, since the end remains the flourishing of citizens.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 2
Justification
Friendship, , occupies two whole books of the and is an indispensable good of the good life: one owes more to kin, benefactors and fellow citizens. This avowed priority of particular bonds, up to the civic friendship that holds the city together, places Aristotelianism on the partialist side.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII-IX
Justification
Against the Platonic ideal city, Aristotelianism seeks the best achievable constitution for a given people under real conditions. The most stable regime is the mixed one resting on a broad middle class, the politeia, which tempers the excesses of democracy and oligarchy: a political realism attentive to circumstances.
Aristotle, Politics, IV, 11
Justification
Moral consideration is reserved for beings endowed with reason: justice and friendship, properly speaking, can exist only among humans, for animals, lacking , do not share in the political community. This moral anthropocentrism, extended by scholasticism, places Aristotelianism firmly at the first pole, animals entering the circle only marginally.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 8; Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 11
Justification
The starting point is the observation of living things: an acorn becomes an oak and not a beech, an organ develops for a function, signs that an end orients the process. To treat this regularity as a mere accident of matter, as Democritus' mechanism does, explains nothing; beyond matter one needs the , the that-for-the-sake-of-which a thing exists. Finalism is thus not projected onto nature but read within it, and it is the internal natures of beings, not an external craftsman, that carry them toward their end.
Nature does nothing in vain.Politics, I.2 (1253a)
Aristotle, Physics, II, 3 and 8 · Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 3
Justification
Aristotelianism affirms a divine principle, the , the final cause of the universe's motion, which it moves as the beloved moves the lover. Yet Aristotle's god is impersonal: pure thought thinking itself, it is neither creator nor providence and takes no concern for the world. Hence a clearly non-extreme theist position that marks this impersonality, before scholasticism identified it, not without tension, with the personal and providential God.
Thought thinks itself in grasping the intelligible, and its thinking is a thinking of thinking.Metaphysics, XII (Lambda).9 (1074b)
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Λ (book XII), 7 and 9
Justification
For Aristotelianism the natural order is hierarchical and goal-directed: nothing in nature is in vain, and plants exist for the sake of animals, animals for the sake of human beings. This teleological anthropocentrism, in which the rest of nature is ordered to human use, leans clearly toward mastery, without thereby denying that the human being remains a living thing within that order.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 8
Justification
The conceives art as mimēsis, the imitation of human action: tragedy represents people in action. This imitation is no servile copy, for the poet portrays what might happen according to probability and necessity, yet it remains a representation of the real rather than creation ex nihilo, hence a position on the mimēsis side.
Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 1-4 and 9
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Justification
The soul is defined as the , or first actuality, of the organized living body: a living thing is not reducible to its material parts, for it is its form that unifies it and makes it what it is. The whole is thus prior in nature to its parts, aligning Aristotelianism with a kind of emergentism avant la lettre.
Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 1 · Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I, 1
Justification
Against Socratic intellectualism, Aristotelianism grants the passions a properly ethical role: to feel fear, anger or pity when one ought, toward whom one ought and as one ought is itself virtue. Well-trained emotions carry a cognitive dimension and accompany sound judgement, without grounding it on their own: the position is moderate, leaning slightly toward judgement.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 5-6 · Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 1-11