Aristotle was born in 384g. d.e. in the Greek city of Stagira. The deep provincial origin of Aristotle was compensated by the fact that he was the son of the famous physician Nicomachus. Being a doctor meant in ancient Greece to occupy a large social position, and Nikomah was known throughout Macedonia.
Aristotle, according to eyewitnesses, from his youth was a nondescript look. He was thin, had thin legs, small eyes and a lisp. But he liked to dress, wore a few expensive rings, and did an unusual hairstyle. Being brought up in the family of a doctor, and therefore himself engaged in medicine, Aristotle, however, did not become a professional doctor. But medicine remained for him for the rest of his life is so native and understandable area that later in his most difficult philosophical treatises he gives explanations using examples from medical practice.
Arriving from the north of Greece, Aristotle at a very early age (at the age of 17) entered Plato’s school. He was at first a principled Platonist, and later departed from strict Platonism. The first works of Aristotle in the walls of the Platonov Academy, where he enters, are distinguished by his penchant for rhetoric, with which he later studied all his life. In 364 BC Aristotle meets with Plato, and they communicated until the death of Plato, i.e. for 17 years. Aristotle seemed to Plato to be an ardent horse, who had to be restrained with a rein. S
ome ancient sources speak directly not only about discrepancy, but even about dislike between two philosophers. Plato strongly disapproved of Aristotle’s peculiar manner of holding himself and dressing. Aristotle attached great attention to his appearance, and Plato thought that this was unacceptable to the true philosopher.
But Aristotle apparently also boldly attacked Plato, which later led to the creation of his own school by Aristotle. For all these disputes, good-natured Plato said that “Aristotle kicks me like a sucker foal his mother.” In the Platonic School, Aristotle obtains the most important foundations of knowledge, possessing which, later, he opens his own school opposite to Platonova, and becomes an ardent opponent of his teacher.
The name of Aristotle in the world literature is directly connected with the name of Plato. We will try to consider the philosophy of Aristotle and relate it to the philosophy of Plato. The central idea of Plato’s philosophy — eidos — was transferred almost entirely to Aristotle. Neither Plato nor Aristotle thinks things without their ideas, or eidos.
The whole philosophy of Socrates, and later of Plato, stemmed from practice and vital necessity, going into a purely theoretical field only in its highest manifestation – in the theory of ideas. According to Plato, the world of things, perceived through the senses, is not the world of the truly existing: sensual things are continuously born and die, change and move, there is nothing permanent, durable, perfect and true in them. And yet things are not completely separated from the truly existing, they are all somehow involved in it.
Namely: Plato asserts everything that is truly essential in them, sensuous things owe their reasons. These causes of the form of things, not perceived by the senses, comprehended only by the mind, are disembodied and insensible. Plato calls them “species” or, more rarely, “ideas.” “Views”, “ideas” are visible forms of the mind of things. Each class of objects of the sensual world, for example, the class of “horses” corresponds in the disembodied world to a certain “kind” or “idea” – “kind” of a horse, “idea” of a horse. This “species” can no longer be comprehended by feelings, like an ordinary horse, but can only be contemplated by the mind, besides by the mind well prepared for such comprehension. These “ideas” or, “eidos” are not born, do not die, do not pass into any other state. There is a “kingdom of ideas”
1. The ideas of the highest value categories of being. This includes such concepts as beauty, justice, truth.
2. The movement of physical phenomena – the ideas of movement, rest, light, sound, etc.
3. The ideas of the discharges of creatures – the ideas of the animal, man.
4. Ideas for objects produced by human effort ideas of the table, bed, etc.
5. The ideas of science – the ideas of numbers, equality, relationships.
Principles of existence of ideas:
a) an idea makes an idea;
b) the idea is a model, looking at which, Demiur created the world of things;
c) the idea is the goal towards which all that exists aspires to the highest good.
The world of things and the world of ideas are united by the soul of the Cosmos. It makes ideas present in things and vice versa. Between the world of things and the world of ideas – deity – Demiur. Aristotle strongly criticizes the fundamental separation of the idea of a thing from the thing itself. The idea of a thing, according to Aristotle, is inside the thing itself. The thesis about the stay of the idea of the thing inside the thing itself is the main and fundamental, which is the main difference between the Platonov and Aristotelian schools.
The idea of a thing, according to Aristotle, is sure to have some kind of generality, i.e. Eidos in every sense. But the eidos of a thing is not only the generalization of its individual elements. It is also something singular. By this singularity, this eidos of a thing is different from other eidos, and therefore from all other things.
The eidos of a thing, being a certain community and a certain singularity, is at the same time a certain kind of wholeness. It is absolutely impossible to detach the common from the single, the singular from the common. That is, by removing any one moment of wholeness, we thereby eliminate wholeness itself. Removing, for example, the roof of a house, the house ceases to be solid, and, in fact, ceases to be a house.
Aristotle expounded his doctrine of a thing as an organism many times and in different ways. He identifies four causes, or four principles of any thing, understood as an organism.
The first principle is that the eidos of a thing is not at all its intrinsic entity, but such an entity that is in it itself and without which it is impossible to understand what a given thing is.
The second principle involves matter and form. It seems that matter and form are a common and understandable opposition, and it seems there is nothing to talk about here. For example, the matter of this table is a tree. And the shape of this table is the kind that took wood materials, processed for a specific purpose. It seems that everything here is very simple and clear. Nevertheless, this problem was one of the deepest philosophical problems of Aristotle. After all, Aristotle’s material is not just just material.
The material of Aristotle already has its own form. Everything, even the most chaotic, disorderly, formless and chaotic, already has its own form. Clouds and clouds during a thunderstorm look absolutely shapeless. However, if the cloud did not have, in fact, no form, how could it be a cognizable thing for us. From here Aristotle concludes that the matter of a thing is only the very possibility of its design, and this possibility is infinitely diverse.
Nevertheless, without matter, eidos would remain only its abstract meaning, without any embodiment of this thought in reality. Only the complete identification of matter with its eidos makes a thing a thing. Eidos and matter were able to distinguish between Plato, and identified them quite well, but what Aristotle did in this area is almost, one can say, a revolution with regard to Platonism. Of those philosophers of antiquity who distinguished form and matter, Aristotle was the most profound and subtle identifier of them. Matter is not eidos, nor eidos in general, nor any eidos in particular.
According to Aristotle, only the cosmic spheres above the Moon are eidetically full. And what happens inside the lunar sphere, in the sublunary, is always partially and imperfectly. and sometimes quite ugly. If where Aristotle acts as a principled materialist, i.e. preaching matter as the principle of living reality of the world around us, it is only in his teaching on matter as a kingdom of chance. According to Aristotle, the movement is a very specific category and is absolutely reducible for nothing else.
Thus, according to Aristotle, motion is the same basic category as matter and form. Aristotle raises the question of the possibility of the very category of movement. He singled out the four principles of the existence of every thing as an organism: matter, form, acting cause. The final principle of the existence of every thing according to Aristotle is the goal. The goal is a specific category, not reducible to anything else. Aristotle, with his theory of the four-principle structure of a thing, proceeded solely from the fact that every thing is the result of creativity.
And it does not matter whether it is a good work or a bad one. All the diversity of the material world, according to Aristotle, is based on different ratios of eidos (form, or idea) and matter in their cause-and-effect embodiment. The transition to the world of animate beings, we see in Aristotle, and here in the foreground a four-principle structure.
Aristotle distinguishes between three types of soul — the vegetable, the sensory (animal) and the intelligent. The rational soul also has its own eidos, and its own matter, and causal – target orientation. The eidos of the living body is the principle of his life, i.e. his soul And every soul that moves the body also has its own eidos, which Aristotle calls the Mind. So the soul, according to Aristotle, is nothing more than the energy of Mind. And Mind is the eidos of all eidos.
According to Aristotle, Mind is the highest degree of being. This Mind, being the highest degree of being in general, is in Aristotle, if to say briefly, the ultimate concept in general. He is the “eidos of eidos.” The mind taken by itself is already absolutely connected with nothing and depends only on itself. In this sense, he is forever motionless. Aristotle believes that the mind, despite all its freedom from mental matter, contains its own, purely mental matter, without which it would not be a work of art. No philosophers before Aristotle allowed the existence of matter in Mind. No one so sharply and fundamentally opposed matter and mind, as Aristotle did. Aristotle created three concepts of Uma prime mover.
The first concept is purely platonic. It comes down to the fact that the mind is the highest and final being. The mind is nothing else than the kingdom of gods – the ideas of higher, or supra-cosmic, inferior, or stellar ones. In the second concept, the Mind of Aristotle has a thinking, and the thinking of himself, i.e. “thinking thinking”. The mind contains within itself its own mental matter, which gives it the opportunity to be eternal beauty (because beauty is the perfect coincidence of idea and matter).
The third concept of Aristotle is very different from Platonovskaya. Plato controls the cosmos World soul. For Aristotle, it is the Mind that drives everything decisively, and therefore it is life as eternal energy. “If the Mind, according to Aristotle, is a universal goal, and therefore loves everything, then he himself, being the goal, is not that he loves nobody at all, but since everything loves him in general, the Mind certainly has to love himself more. “Aristotle said:” Plato is my friend, but the truth is more precious “And Aristotle’s whole life consisted in an endless desire to find, analyze, grasp the truth, get to the bottom of the meaning of the surrounding world. In his zoological treatises, Aristotle establishes and characterizes more than 400 species of animals. He described 158 different Greek and non-Greek legislations. The whole V book of his main treatise “Metaphysics” is specifically devoted to philosophical terminology, and each term in it appears in 5 – 6 meanings. Aristotle was a strong man.
And when it turned out that there was nowhere to go, and they could deal with him as before with Socrates, he, as it can be supposed, took poison. So ended the life of Aristotle. And yet his quest, his whole life, testifies to the unprecedented courage of a great man, for whom even death itself has become an act of wisdom and calmness.