Aristotle

First science is born of wonder and is pursued for its own sake, not for its usefulness: like the free man, it is its own end. And the theoretical life, the activity of what is most divine in us, is the highest happiness. Yet Aristotle keeps a place for the practical aim: we do not study ethics to know what virtue is, but to become good.

This alone of all the sciences is free, for it alone exists for its own sake.Metaphysics, I.2 (982b)

Metaphysics, I.1-2 · Nicomachean Ethics, X.7-8 · Nicomachean Ethics, II.2 (1103b)

Against Platonic innatism, knowledge starts from perception, from which induction draws out universal principles, a legacy the Scholastic tradition would later sum up as "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses". The empiricism remains moderate, since the active intellect then grasps essences, hence a non-extreme position.

Posterior Analytics, II.19 · On the Soul, III.4-8

Science (epistēmē) is demonstrative knowledge: a knowledge of the necessary, derived by syllogism from true, immediate first principles better known than the conclusion. This confidence in a certain, grounded knowledge places Aristotle on the side of dogmatism, tempered by his admission that the practical domain admits only an approximate exactness.

Posterior Analytics, I.2 · Nicomachean Ethics, I.3 (1094b)

Against Plato, Aristotle rejects separate Forms: the universal is real, but it exists only within individuals, as their form. The form of the horse does not exist apart from singular horses, yet it is genuinely real in them. This is an immanent realism.

Metaphysics, Z; Categories, 5

Aristotle gives the classic formulation of correspondence: the truth of a statement lies in its agreement with what is the case.

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)

Metaphysics, IV (Gamma).7 (1011b)

The desire to know is not an instrument of happiness: it is constitutive of our nature, and contemplation (theōria), the most self-sufficient and continuous of activities, realizes what is highest in the human being; an accomplished life culminates in knowing, not in usefulness.

All men by nature desire to know.Metaphysics, I, 1, 980a

Metaphysics, I, 1 · Nicomachean Ethics, X

If every action aims at an end, and ends link up as means, then, on pain of infinite regress, there must be a final end willed for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else: this self-sufficient good is eudaimonia. What it consists in is settled by the function argument (ergon): as the flute-player has his excellence, the human has his own, the activity of the soul's rational part carried out in accordance with virtue. Happiness is therefore neither pleasure, nor honour, nor wealth, but an excellent activity unfolded over a whole life, whose highest form is contemplation.

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)

Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 (1097b) · Nicomachean Ethics, X.7

From the general finalism follows a consequence for human existence: what holds for the eye or the plant holds for the human, who likewise has a proper function (ergon) inscribed in its nature. The meaning of life is accordingly neither received from elsewhere nor freely invented: it is to be actualized from a nature already oriented toward its end, rational activity. Hence the leaning toward a given meaning, while leaving each individual the task of bringing into act what is at first only in potency.

Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 (the function argument) · Physics, II.8

Aristotle turns Plato's own demand for essence against him: if the essence of a thing is what makes it what it is, lodging it in a separate world of Forms makes it unable to explain the sensible thing, from which it is then cut off. The form must therefore be immanent in the individual, as the soul is in the body: every sensible substance is a compound of matter and form, hylomorphism. Essence is no longer a celestial model but the what-it-was-to-be, what the thing is in itself, grasped in the definition, without thereby denying that form is the most real and most knowable thing in it.

Metaphysics, VII (Zeta).4 and 17

Aristotle does not repress desire but orders it: appetite (orexis) must obey practical reason as a child lives according to its father's command. The virtue of temperance aims at the mean, desiring what one ought, when and as one ought, neither asceticism nor unbridled affirmation but a reasoned selection of desires.

Nicomachean Ethics, III.11-12; I.13 (1102b)

Pleasure is neither the good nor an evil: it completes the activity as the bloom of youth crowns the young. The virtue of temperance is the mean between intemperance and insensibility, the latter defect being itself a vice, hence a position just past the balance point, on the side of a measured celebration.

Nicomachean Ethics, X.4 (1174b); III.11

Against Socratic intellectualism, for which no one does evil willingly and virtue reduces to knowledge, Aristotle observes that knowing the good does not suffice to do it: virtue is not a science but a disposition (hexis) of character, acquired by the repetition of just acts as one becomes a lyre-player by playing the lyre. The right action thus cannot be deduced from any general rule: it consists in aiming, in each situation, at the mean relative to us between excess and defect, determined by the practical wisdom of the discerning person. Hence a morality governed neither by consequences nor by a law, but by the kind of person one becomes.

Nicomachean Ethics, II.1 and II.6

Equity (epieikeia) corrects the law where its generality fails in the singular case: it is a rectification of law. It is practical wisdom (phronesis), knowledge of the particular, that judges in situation rather than mechanically applying a rule.

Nicomachean Ethics, V.10 (equity) · Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5 (practical wisdom)

Against the sophists who held the city to be a mere convention (nomos) opposed to nature, Aristotle derives it from a natural genesis: from the couple comes the household, from households the village, from villages the city, the term that at last achieves self-sufficiency and living well. The proof lies in the logos: only the human has the speech that distinguishes the just from the unjust, and such a power would be pointless were the human not made for shared life. The city is therefore not posterior to a pact of already-constituted individuals; it is by nature prior, and whoever can do without it is either a beast or a god.

Man is by nature a political animal.Politics, I.2 (1253a)

Politics, I.2 (1253a)

For Aristotle the criterion of priority is not chronological but functional: prior is that without which the rest cannot fulfil its function. Now a hand severed from the body is a hand only in name, since it can no longer grasp; likewise the individual outside the city cannot fulfil its nature and remains an unfinished human. The city is therefore by nature prior to the individual as the whole to the part, an avowed holism that does not, for all that, erase the city's end, the living-well of its citizens.

The city is by nature prior to the individual, for the whole is necessarily prior to the part.Politics, I.2 (1253a)

Politics, I.2 (1253a)

Against Platonic erōs, which makes love the desire for a beauty one does not possess, Aristotle sets at the summit not lack but the bond: philia. In books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguishes three friendships by their spring, the useful, the pleasant and the good; the first two are fragile, for they love the other for what he provides. Perfect friendship, that of good people who wish each other well for the other's own sake, is stable, rare and reciprocal, to the point that the friend counts as an extension of oneself; to will their good for their sake alone, expecting nothing in return, keeps a share of gift at the very heart of the reciprocity. Far from being a supplement to the good life, it is a constitutive part of it: no one, however well supplied with all other goods, would choose to live without friends.

The friend is another self.Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 4

Nicomachean Ethics, VIII-IX (the three friendships; the friend as another self) · Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 9 (happiness and the need for friends)

The anthropocentrism is explicit: plants exist for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of humans. A hierarchy of souls (vegetative, sensitive, rational) places the human at the summit, other living beings being ordered to its use.

Politics, I.8 (1256b)

Friendship (philia) is a good indispensable to the good life, and it is ordered: one owes more to one's own, parents and benefactors, than to strangers, and civic philia holds the city together. The legitimate priority given to those close to us places Aristotle on the side of partialism.

Nicomachean Ethics, VIII-IX; IX.2

Aristotle rejects Plato's ideal city and starts from actual constitutions: the legislator must aim not at the absolutely best regime but at the best possible for given circumstances. Hence his praise of the mixed regime (politeia) resting on a broad middle class, a realist and empirical stance.

Politics, IV.1 and 11

Against Parmenides, who made change unthinkable (being cannot come from non-being), Aristotle distinguishes potentiality and actuality: becoming is not an emergence out of nothing but the actualization of what was potential, within a persisting substrate. Substance endures through the change of its accidents, form realizes itself in matter: being and becoming cease to be rivals, becoming is the way beings accomplish their form.

Nature is a principle of motion and change.Physics, III.1 (200b)

Physics, I.8 · Metaphysics, IX (Theta)

Why does a thing come to be? Aristotle finds incomplete any answer that invokes only matter or the collision of bodies, as the Presocratic physicists did: four causes are needed (material, formal, efficient, final), and it is the final cause that orders them. His decisive argument comes from living things, where observation reveals organs made for a function: the acorn becomes an oak, the eye serves for seeing. He extends this oriented regularity to all of nature, which does nothing in vain: the end is no conscious plan but the immanent term toward which a process tends by its very form.

Nature does nothing in vain.Politics, I.2 (1253a)

Physics, II.3 and II.8 · Metaphysics, I.3

Aristotle demonstrates the existence of a first unmoved mover, pure actuality and final cause that moves the world as the beloved moves the lover, without being moved. This is a form of theism, but of an impersonal god that does not create, exercises no providence and does not know particulars, hence a value held well back from the extreme.

Thought thinks itself in grasping the intelligible, and its thinking is a thinking of thinking.Metaphysics, XII (Lambda).9 (1074b)

Metaphysics, XII (Lambda).7 and 9 · Physics, VIII.6

Nature does nothing in vain and has arranged everything for an end: plants for animals, animals for humans. This hierarchical teleology orders living things to human use, hence a clear orientation toward an anthropocentric mastery of nature.

Politics, I.8 (1256b); Physics, II.8

For Aristotle, the arts are modes of imitation (mimēsis): tragedy, epic and painting represent human beings in action. Imitation is natural to humankind and a source of pleasure and learning, which firmly anchors the conception of art as mimesis.

Poetics, 1-4 (1447a-1448b)