Continuing with our earlier analysis of the Classical Greek period, Aristotle,
who lived in the 4th century BCE, continued the direct line of tutelage from Socrates
and Plato. By most accounts, he was the first “scientist” as we understand the term today.
Biology, astronomy, geology, and many other fields – if he did not invent it,
he established the major foundations for it to thrive. Much like his predecessors, Aristotle did
not have a clear separation between philosophy, science, politics or any branch of knowledge:
everything was interwoven. His method of research, however, was much more focused on the senses and
observation. He was “empirical”, from the Greek empeirikos meaning practice and experience,
in contrast with other abstract thought. He would observe animals and plants in order to analyze
them, and attempt to understand their behavior and characteristics through this observation.
Afterwards, all explanations must be adequate and follow a rigorous format in order to maintain
objectivity. He was very interested in language, with extensive writings in rhetoric, the art of
guiding public emotions through words intended to convince others. Dialectics, its counterpart,
is a more private and academic manner of debating based on developing an argument with premises that
are based on the concessions of another. And finally, logic, which is a tool for analyzing
discourse in a thorough and quasi-mathematical manner, where a conclusion must, by necessity,
be a direct result of its premises. As we already saw, this was an essential tool for discourse
clarification in every science, and this was the first time it was established explicitly. Logic
allowed us to see beyond any flair or trick of language to understand the core of what is being
said. We’ll delve further in this creation of his in the next tutorial, but it was undeniably a game
changer for any future scientific endeavor – a system so reliable that it went without
major overhaul until the early 20th century. However, being such an early scientist also
meant treading through uncharted territory, so Aristotle held many false beliefs. He believed
life could spring from nothing, due to observing eels lacking gonads simply appearing in mud,
unaware that they’d only develop them in a journey very far from there. Still in the realm of gonads,
he theorized that snakes do not have two legs because they do not have penises – twice wrong
on a single affirmation, as they do have penises, and the attributes are clearly unrelated. He also
believed women had fewer teeth, colder blood, and that enslavement could be natural to some
people lacking rational skills, among other bad ideas. But we can see a pattern here:
Aristotle was very concerned with the purpose of things. He posited the existence of a single
primary substance from which everything arose, taking different Forms-with-a-capital-F. But
unlike Plato we can properly understand them with experience – a direct criticism of Plato,
as according to Aristotle, Plato’s theory of Forms could not account for creation and modification.
His physics postulate that forms cannot change without interference, even if non-intentional.
Thus, everything has a purpose, or a “Telos” in Greek, as the heart beats for pumping blood,
the lungs function for breathing air, and so on. Not only that, but species also have these
purposes, or their “own function”: cats excel in being agile, horses are extremely vigorous,
and so they live happily or flourish when they exercise these characteristics. This
biological perspective connected to a purpose, which we can call a “teleological” perspective,
would dominate biology until Darwin, who would be the first to develop a system for understanding
how physical characteristics rise from adaptation and selection rather than proper function.
Humans, on the other hand, are social animals with a natural desire for knowledge,
according to Aristotle. They thrive on several levels of communities, from their close family
to the entire city they live in, and they do so by communicating. Thus, the function of
humans is rational discourse, or reason. To act in a good manner, then, is to rationally
analyze how a certain action can be good or not. Following his criticism of the platonic forms,
what is “good” is too ever-changing, and related to every individual context it appears in.
For Aristotle, prudence is the virtue that should lead one’s moral life: to deliberate prudently is
to better judge which action is appropriate in given situation. For example, if you saw someone
attempting to kill another person, what would you do? For Aristotle, vice, the opposite of virtue,
would be characterized by the extremes, either a lack or excess of virtue. In this example,
running away with no intention to look back is a lack of courage, which we can call cowardice,
while trying to overpower or kill the attacker would be an excess of courage, or rashness. To
act virtuously would be to inform your courage with prudence. You could attempt to notify the
authorities, or perhaps disarm or immobilize the attacker. This could be viewed as acting with the
right balance of courage and prudence. Yet, the correct path would never be a single one, and also
never the same, because the virtuous act depends heavily on the context. There is ambiguity halfway
between actions, as running away to survive or to attempt to notify authorities are both closer to
simply abandoning the victim than attempting to overpower a dangerous person. There’s no
easy path to virtuous life, but habit is the key: the exercise of rational prudence then, without
neglecting your emotions, would lead to virtuous actions that help the agent reach its telos,
or its goal as a person – which is to flourish as a human being and achieve true happiness. This
brand of virtue ethics, focusing on improving human action rather than identifying objective,
immutable principles of what is “good” or “bad”, is still very strong in current philosophical
perspectives, surviving many iterations and different interpretations, to be one of the
three major ethical schools still being studied. Adapting Plato both in method and in form,
Aristotle then constructed his political theory based on these previous conceptions of humans
and their actions. The best governments and political systems would be the ones which
provide the best environment for happiness and flourishing. Justice, thus, would be an important
virtue while analyzing methods of government, and so he proposed three different methods,
each with a virtuous and vicious version. When a single ruler acts toward the flourishing of
most of the population, we have a virtuous Kingship; if this ruler acts for a minority,
as for himself, it is a Tyranny. If a government of a few, chosen “best” people, an Aristocracy,
would act toward the flourishing of the many, it’d be even better than the Kingship, as it is harder
to corrupt a few people than just one person holding all the power. However, a party typically
of the rich few governing only for themselves, an Oligarchy, would be its vicious version.
Democracy comes next, but as the deviant version of the “Polity” or “Constitutional Government”,
since the former would imply a government of the majority only for the majority, usually the poor,
according to Aristotle, while the latter would be a government of the majority for
everyone. However, democracy is still the best among the worst, and he criticizes the utopian
perspective of his predecessors, as democracy might realistically be the best existing choice
until everyone is able to become virtuous. It would seem to be the case that pooling the
different virtues of many citizens is better than relying on the virtues of only a few aristocrats.
Aristotle’s work was wide and far-reaching. Much of his work remained obscure during the early
middle ages, but thanks to the preservation of his original works and translations made
by Muslim scholars, in the 12th and 13th centuries Aristotle’s works were rediscovered with new Latin
translations and commentaries, thus heavily influencing philosophy in medieval times,
as we shall see later. However, like many other figures from the ancient world,
only slightly more than 30 of his treatises survived from almost 200. Plato was one of the
lucky few whose entire works survived these almost 2400 years. Hopefully,
archeological efforts will uncover more in the future, but until then,
what already remains still has and will continue to have a great deal of impact on humanity. In
the next tutorial we’ll broadly analyze how Aristotle developed and established Logic,
and then continue with some more history to see how it influenced his successors.