#159 Aristotle: The World's Greatest Philosopher?

Within Reason - Alex J O'Connor

This episode explores Aristotle’s enduring influence, emphasizing his unique blend of metaphysics, biology, and ethics. The discussion highlights how his methodical thinking and challenge to earlier philosophers like Par

Key takeaways

• Aristotle redefined reality through potentiality and actuality

Transcript preview

John Sellers, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Aristotle is perhaps the most celebrated and influential philosopher of all time. Do you think he's overrated? No, absolutely not. I mean he's an incredibly difficult thinker to get to grips with, but I think once you do and you kind of really get a sense of how his mind works, I mean I think it's absolutely incredible. I don't think that, I don't think that that involved thinking that he's right about everything. I don't think you have to agree with Aristotle to think he's an incredible thinker. I think it's just the way that he analyzes things, the way he makes divisions. He's very, very good at saying, look, it's just not as simple as that. We need to complicate this issue further. And I think that that's like a really valuable skill or trait for a philosopher. And the other thing that he'll do that's really impressive is we'll see him kind of make a first stab at an answer to a question, and then slightly more refined answer to the same question and then another so there's a sense in which you can see him thinking through the problem and so if you read him in a way where you think okay this is a big systematic thinker and you see these kind of seeming contradictory statements you think God what's going on here all these logical inconsistencies what he's saying but if you get the sense that you've got to kind of get into the rhythm of his thought process and you see him okay here's the general statement now let's refine it refine it now let's refine it So people will have heard of Aristotle, but maybe especially if they're watching an introduction like this, they might not really know what he's all about. So in the fewest possible words to start with, like what's what's the hype? What's so great about Aristotle? So I mean perhaps start with a very small bit of biography. So Aristotle is a student of Plato, he's as a teenager, he goes to Plato's Academy in Athens. He studies with Plato for 20 years. is effectively Plato's greatest and brightest student. So he's coming in that legacy, right? Socrates Plato, Aristotle. And so he's drawing on all of those platonic ideas, but then he's challenging them and questioning them and moving them on to kind of the next stage. So that's kind of one part of what he's doing. But he's also a natural scientist. In fact, I think the best way to think about Aristotle as a thinker is first and foremost he's a biologist. He's interested in understanding. the natural world. He's interesting understanding organisms, including us and how they operate. And so you've got this combination of kind of very refined complex metaphysics that he's inheriting from Plato and you've got this really down-to-earth nitty-gritty let's understand the physical world. He's bringing both of those things together. At the same time he's also interested in politics, he's interested in literature, he invents formal logic. I mean there's no one in history that is invented more accurate academic disciplines than Aristotle, that's quite an achievement for anyone to do. Yeah, that's fair enough. Okay, so I think, and the thing is, each of these areas, like formal logic and his sort of so-called metaphysics and his ethics and they're sort of whirled under themselves. So I think the best thing to do is to kind of take them one by one and start getting a feel for the kind of stuff that Aristotle was thinking about. So I suppose like one of the most foundational questions, people often start with ethics stuff, but I always like to lead that to last. We spoke before about stoicism and we did the same thing. Everyone knows that stoics are people who hold fast in the face of suffering, but let's do the metaphysics first and then see why that's what comes out of it. So for Aristotle, I suppose the sort of fundamental question for a philosopher might be something like, what is being, what is substance, what is the universe made out of, what is the foundational nature of reality? when we start getting a feel for his picture of that? So I think to come back to something I was saying earlier his first move is to say it's more complicated than anyone else has thought right so kind of the famous sort of early metaphys in Greek philosophy is a guy called Parmenides who's a big influence on Plato in many ways and Pimenezes says well things either exist or they don't exist there's no middle ground right one or the other. And things can't suddenly come to be out of nothing, right? So you can't have existing things suddenly appearing. And equally you can't have things that exist vanishing into thin air, right? That doesn't happen either. So things either are or they are not. And ultimately, Pomeneses says, well, everything just is, everything just exists, right? You can't have a non-existent thing. And so if you just have existence and nothing can fall out of existence and you kind of just have permanent eternal existence. Everything just is all the time, right? And this is all very kind of armchair philosophy, right? And so Plato inherits these ideas. Clearly Aristotle and Plato are talking about these things in the academy when Aristotle was young. And he comes along and says, well look, we need to complicate this. This is a far too simplistic way to think about existence, right? So for instance, this chair exists. It's a thing. the brownness of the chair also exists. But the brownness doesn't exist on its own. You can't have brownness just like that. You can have a brown chair. So the brownness exists as an attribute of the chair. So it exists in a different way to the way the chair exists, right? So suddenly we've got two ways of thinking about what is or what is real. And then he's, given that he's interested in organisms, biology and the natural world, the one defining characteristic of the natural world is change, right? Everything's constantly in motion. This is something again that Parmenides kind of is denying. Things just are and they don't change. So, as I was, no, no, everything's changing. Everything's moving all the time. And if we look at physical processes and organisms, then these give us really clear examples of this. So classic example would be, say, the acorn, right? So an acorn is an acorn, it also is going to become an oak tree or has the potential to become an oak tree. And so there's a sense in which the acorn is two things at the same time. It is an acorn and it is potentially an oak tree in the way in which nothing else is potentially an oak tree. Yeah and that potentiality is like part of what the acorn is. You wouldn't fully understand the nature of an acorn unless you understood its potentialities. And I mean you mentioned Palmenides who, it's, it's quite hard to sort of interpret it's. him, but he seems to deny the existence of change. Because he sort of says, as you say, like stuff that is, is, stuff that is not, is not. For something to change would mean that something which is not would need to sort of come into being, you know, for there to be a tree that grows or something, there would need to be something like a tree that wasn't there before. That's something coming from nothing. That doesn't make sense. So Permann't, so Parmenides sort of this paradox of change. And Aristotle, in a, and to sort of answer this concern starts with the distinction he says well you know there are different ways in which something can be and for an acorn it is an acorn but it's also potentially a tree and you might think or potentiality isn't like it's not really a thing it's doesn't exist but the acorn isn't potentially a chicken this doesn't have the potential to become a chicken but it does have the potential to become a tree so whatever that is it's like it's real and it means something right yeah absolutely as you said it's the defining characteristic of an characteristic of an acorn can it has the potential to do that so that is really really important and so this kind of really challenges the sorts of thing that say Parmenzi is saying because the acorn is defined by what it is not at the moment yeah but what it can become so that's quite nice and the other thing that's also going on here if you think back to sort of Plato I mean lots of people will have their kind of sort of caricature of platonic metaphysics right there are ideal forms that are unchanging and then the physical world is constantly changing and it's just some kind of sort of sort of shadow of these really existing unchanging things. So again, Plato's committed to this idea that the things that really exist are eternal and don't alter and the things that change are somehow secondary and less important. And so again, Aristotle wants to challenge that and say, no, it's all this changing stuff that isn't fixed in its being. That's the interesting stuff. That's the world we want to understand. Yeah, okay, so that's interesting. you know when we're talking about stuff that exists there's sort of potential and there's actual you know there's there's a con's a potentially a tree and when it becomes a tree it's actually a tree and it has the potential to decay or whatever okay so what you know who cares what does that mean why would someone bother thinking about about that okay an acorn potentially becomes a tree like who cares so I mean it's just part of trying to understand the natural world right if you're trying to do science I mean you're going to want to understand how these processes work. But I think, so I mean, I think one really interesting to do in thinking about a philosopher is who their enemies are, right? Who's the bad guy? Yeah, right? And for Aristotle, I think the bad guy is Democritus, the atomist. Right. Yes. So Democritus is kind of presenting what we would now call a kind of reductive materialism, right. Everything can be just reduced down to matter in motion. Democritus is one of our earliest, perhaps the earliest thinkers who believe that the universe is made out of sort of small indivisible, or atom. I mean the word atom just means indivisible, right? It's unfortunate that we have since split the atom. But by atom literally we mean whatever the most indivisible, small sort of unit of stuff is. That's what an atom is and Democritus says, the universe is made up of atoms, whatever the nature of those atoms are, and everything that exist, and everything that exists that exist, can exist can be, of those atoms, which sounds a lot like a modern materialists and this is the kind of thing that Demoktors is talking about. Yeah, absolutely and you know you're all too aware of all of the sorts of problems that that might raise if you're just talking about dead matter in motion how it is it that some things are alive and how does consciousness grow out of just the interactions of these bits of dead matter, right? So this is Aristotle's sort of big concern that just describing the physical world in terms of that kind of inner matter. That model just isn't rich enough to explain the kind of the complexity and the variety that we see in the natural world, and particularly in biological organisms where. So I mean, think back to the acorn, right? If you're a, if you're a kind of productive materialist, you break it up, you look at all the components, you see what it's made out of. In theory, that's your complete explanation of what it is. But that doesn't tell you anything about trees. not really enough. Yeah, right, right, right. So it's only a partial explanation we might say. Sure. I mean, a modern thinker might be quick to kind of criticize Aristotle that they might sort of say, well, if you actually knew everything about the molecular makeup of the acorn and the molecular makeup of the chemical surrounding it or like of the sunlight and all this kind of you actually knew all of those facts and put them together, you would kind of predict a tree that there that. a few things to consider as firstly maybe it's not as simple as that but also like Aristotle is very early on here you know he's one of our earliest people to be thinking about this kind of stuff and so yeah sometimes he misses things we now know to be true but like it is still undisputedly a genius for his time I mean there's one interesting moment where Aristotle seems to kind of prefigure evolutionarily like he considers the possibility of like essentially natural selection he that he describes it and then he dismisses it for reasons which now we understand the evolution seem a bit to sort of forthright but the fact that that was even sort of something that was considered by him is is pretty astonishing so I don't know I kind of want to just sort of protect Aristotle's reputation against what might be called presentism and realize that we're dealing with a we're dealing with a mind here okay you said talking about like who his enemies are okay so you've got democratist the atomist you also talked about how Aristotle was a student of Plato and there are some really important ways in which Aristotle differs from Plato right so you just alluded to this concept of the forms and in the context of change but can you tell me a bit more about what like Plato's idea of forms were and how Aristotle thinks about things differently so I mean precisely what Plato thinks about ideal forms is a kind of a vex question so I mean precisely what Plato thinks about It says different things in different dialogues, but he seems to be committed to the idea that the kind of really, really secure knowledge that he's after can't be knowledge of something that's changeable, right? Because you think you know it and then you go back to it a week later and it's different. So you don't really know it after all. There's a sense in which for Plato, real knowledge looks like mathematics, right? Eternal and unchanging, 2 plus 2 always equals 4. And so he thinks that if all of our knowledge has to look like that, then it's going to have to be knowledge of unchanging ideas. And so he thinks that as we look at objects in the physical world, as we look at chairs for instance, we ought not to be so concerned about the particular chair in front of us, which is going to change and decay and not be there forever. But instead we want to kind of... I was going to say abstract but that's not the right word we're going to want to try and get to the idea of chair in itself we want to move from the particular chairs we see to the idea of chairness and he thinks that idea of chairness if it's unchanging must have always existed and then there's all the kind of very weird and wonderful stuff about was there a past life when we encounter these ideas directly before we then know The question is, right, right? You've got a chair over there, I've got a chair over here. And there's a table in between them, right? There's something that these two chairs have in common, that they both don't have in common with the table, which is why we call these chairs in that table. And the question is like, what is it? They're not the same object, yours is over there, mine's over here, but they've got something which connects them, of them must like sort of participate in right and our knowledge of what a chair is now must be because we had some kind of prior understanding before our birth he entertains this idea that we were sort of existing in the realm of forms which is a little bit wacky and a little bit weird but look it's a it's a real problem right because otherwise we've just got a bunch of matter and it's like arranged various ways yeah you know I could call it a chair but I could also use it like a table or something to say that there's this real thing that there's this real thing this real thing that there's this real thing that these lampshade doesn't means there must be this sort of form of chairness that they all participate in. Aristotle is aware of this problem, but he doesn't agree with Plato's solution. No, I mean, let me give a kind of a more sensible and sympathetic account of what Plato's doing here as well, right? And he, as I say, he says different things in different places, so he's actually quite difficult to pin down on this. Another way to describe what Plato saying is, look, for you to be able to go into the world and recognize a chair, you, you have the idea of chair in your head in some sense. So he's effectively saying that there's certain ideas and concept that we must know a priori, we must know them before we go out and experience the world. They're not things that we kind of concoct off the back of experience. They must be there already, right? So for your viewers who know who are kind of deep into their philosophy, ready, right, he's can't, he's not hum. Would be a way of describing where Plato is on this. So a priori concepts must be there in place already. And then there's the kind of the weird and wonderful stories about and did we encounter those a priori concepts in a past life, which obviously, Kant doesn't go that far. But what Aristotle want to do is want to bring that idea of form down to Earth. So for instance, again, I mean, it's a mundane example, but the chair again, right? structure and organisation of the matter that makes it up. So these chairs do share something in common and it's the way in which the matter is structured and organized. But as soon as you destroy all the chairs in the world, there is no form left. So the form is dependent on the particular things that exist, rather than being some kind of eternal idea that exists independent. So for Plato, the form exists and the objects sort of exist as reflections of the. form, which for Aristotle, the individual objects exist, and the form sort of comes out of those individual objects, sort of like flips it on its head and reverses it and says that the metaphysical starting point is the objects in the world from which we get forms rather than the other way round. I suppose is like one way of thinking about it. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, episodes like this take a lot of planning. And last night I was up fairly late reading everything I could about Aristotle and I soon, and I soon realized that I just kind of hadn't had enough to eat. But I'd been so wrapped up in my prep that I also hadn't gotten any food in and I didn't really feel like waiting for a delivery or something. So I might have felt a bit stuck. I would have been a bit stuck. Were it not for today's sponsor, Huell. That's H-U-E-L. I reached for one of these. 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I drink one of these almost every single day and as a new customer there's a deal on for you. If you go to heel.com forward slash Alex O'Connor, and use the code Alex O'Connor, then you'll get 15% off. So thanks to Hue back to John Sellers. Okay. So for Aristotle, form is like some kind of structure or arrangement of a sort of set of matter. So he's got matter and he's got form and these two being put together gives us this concept of hylo-Hylomorphism, right? I think, well, Hilo must mean something like matter matter. meaning form, so you get like hyalomorphism, the idea that what an object is is a mixture of matter and form. And if you're familiar with like scholastic philosophy, you will begin to see the influence of this kind of thinking on people like Thomas Aquinas, who also sort of felt the same thing. I mean Aristotle is a titan of philosophy to the extent that if you read Thomas Aquinas, he just refers to him as the philosopher. That's a that's Aristotle's name in Thomas Aquic's name, just that significant but okay so we've got an idea of Aristotle's metaphysics we've got this thing called holomorphism matter and form we've got a rejection of Plato we've got a rejection of democratus I think there's one more sort of missing picture before we can talk about some of the implications of this metaphysical worldview which is Aristotle has some pretty specific views on the nature of causation so we talked about objects which exist and the form in which they exist but there's also like reasons why things exist right and a corn doesn't In the modern age, if I ask you to explain something's cause, like if I say, what was the cause of this chair, you might say, well, it was whoever made it or