Aristotle Sentence Examples
Aristotle held that the vas or active intelligence alone is immortal.
Aristotle is much nearer a conception of evolution than his master Plato.
Aristotle left no work on geography, so that it is impossible to know what facts he associated with the science of the earth's surface.
This conception of matter, as infinitely divisible and continuous, was taught by Anaxagoras more than four centuries before the Christian era, and in the philosophy of Aristotle the same ideas are found.
She read widely though unsystematically, studying philosophy in Aristotle, Leibnitz, Locke and Condillac, and feeding her imagination with Rene and Childe Harold.
AdvertisementAnd the chief contribution of Aristotle to theism is a theory, found in his Physics as well as his Metaphysics, of God as first mover of the universe, himself unmoved.
Again, in the scheme of mechanism, everything is determined by everything else - in 5 Aristotle and the schoolmen meant by a proof a priori reasoning from cause to effect.
The threatened dualism of ideal and material becomes for Aristotle mainly a contrast of matter and form; the lower stage in development desires or aims at the higher, matter more and more tending to pass into form, till God is form without any matter.
The authors he most carefully studied at this period were Thucydides and Aristotle, and for their writings he formed an attachment which remained to the close of his life, and exerted a powerful influence upon his mode of thought and opinions, as well as upon his literary occupations in subsequent years.
He quotes Aristotle, Heraclides Ponticus, Aeschines Socraticus, Idomeneus of Lampsacus and Duris of Samos, and is also indebted through some Alexandrine intermediary to Ephorus and Theopompus.
AdvertisementThe second book continues the history of his conquests, and the third contains the victory over Porus, the relations with the Brahmins, the letter to Aristotle on the wonders of India, the histories of Candace and the Amazons, the letter to Olympias on the marvels of Farther Asia, and lastly the account of Alexander's death in Babylon.
Yet on the whole Aristotle leans to a teleological theory of evolution, which he interprets dualistually by means of certain metaphysical distinctions.
In fact, there is a period when, as Aristotle long ago said, the embryo of the highest animal has the form of a mere worm, and, devoid of internal and external organization, is merely an almost structureless lump of polype-substance.
The origin of the organography of the present day may be traced back to Aristotle, who described the parts of plants as organs, though very simple ones.
Aristotle had himself shown that in the southern temperate zone winds similar to those of the northern temperate zone should blow, but from the opposite direction.
AdvertisementThe circular outline had given way in geographical opinion to the elliptical with the long axis lying east and west, and Aristotle was inclined to view it as a very long and relatively narrow band almost encircling the globe in the temperate zone.
In 1705 Cartesianism was still subject to prohibitions from the authorities; but in a project of new statutes, drawn up for the faculty of arts at Paris in 1720, the Method and Meditations of Descartes were placed beside the Organon and the Metaphysics of Aristotle as text-books for philosophical study.
Reason and revelation are separate sources of knowledge; and man can put himself in possession of each, because he can bring himself into relation to the church on the one hand, and the system of philosophy, or more strictly Aristotle, on the other.
The first book, after a short introduction upon the nature of theology as understood by Aquinas, proceeds in 119 questions to discuss the nature, attributes and relations of God; and this is not done as in a modern work on theology, but the questions raised in the physics of Aristotle find a place alongside of the statements of Scripture, while all subjects in any way related to the central theme are brought into the discourse.
Plato, while admiring Pericles' intellect, accuses him of pandering to the mob; Aristotle in his Politics and especially in the Constitution of Athens, which is valuable in that it gives the dates of Pericles' enactments as derived from an official document, accepts the same view.
AdvertisementThey used as their sources Valerius, the letter to Aristotle and the Iter ad Paradisum, adding much of their own.
The letter from Alexander to Aristotle and his correspondence with Dindimus are found in Early English versions dating from the 11th century.
He purchased from the family of Neleus of Skepsis in the Troad manuscripts of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus (including their libraries), which had been given to Neleus by Theophrastus himself, whose pupil Neleus had been.
The metaphysics of Aristotle, the ethics of Spinoza, the philosophical works of Cicero, and many kindred works, were also frequent subjects of study.
We have seen that the name of Italy was originally applied only to the southernmost part of the peninsula, and was only gradually extended so as to comprise the central regions, such as Latium and Campania, which were designated by writers as late as Thucydides and Aristotle as in Opicia.
AdvertisementAristotle has impressed the ordinary mind chiefly by his criticism of Plato's ideal theory; and therefore he is often ranked as the father of empiricists.
To Aristotle the whole of nature is instinct with a vital impulse towards some higher manifestation.
In some respects Aristotle approaches the modern view of evolution.
Very curious, in relation to modern evolutional ideas, is the Stoical doctrine that our world is but one of a series of exactly 1 Zeller says that through this distinction Aristotle first made possible the idea of development.
Lewes's Aristotle, p. 187.
In fact, while holding firmly by the former, Bonnet more or less modified the latter in his later writings, and, at length, he admits that a " germ " need not be an actual miniature of the organism, hut that it may be merely an " original preformation " capable of producing the latter.4 But, thus defined, the germ is neither more nor less than the "particula genitalis" of Aristotle, or the "primordium vegetale" or " ovum " of Harvey; and the " evolution " of such a germ would not be distinguishable from " epigenesis."
Aristotle, Haller, Harvey, Kielmeyer, Autenrieth, and many others have either made this observation incidentally, or, especially the latter, have drawn particular attention to it, and drawn therefrom results of permanent importance for physiology."
The epidemic nature of wheat-rust was known to Aristotle about 350 B.C., and the Greeks and Romans knew these epidemics well, their philosophers having shrewd speculations as to causes, while the people held characteristic superstitions regarding them, which found vent in the dedication of special festivals and deities to the pests.
Aristotle, too, gave greater definiteness to the idea of zones conceived by Parmenides, who had pictured a torrid zone uninhabitable by reason of heat, two frigid zones uninhabitable by reason of cold, and two intermediate temperate zones fit for human occupation.
Aristotle defined the temperate zone as extending from the tropic to the arctic circle, but there is some uncertainty as to the precise meaning he gave to the term " arctic circle."
The subject is man, treated as Aristotle does, according to his TE¦os, and so Aquinas discusses all the ethical, psychological and theological questions which arise; but any theological discussion upon man must be mainly ethical, and so a great proportion of the first part, and almost the whole of the second, has to do with ethical questions.
Natorp's article quoted there gives the reference to the passage in Aristotle, but does not recognize its connexion with the later Stoical distinction.
Strato appears to reject Aristotle's idea of an original source of movement and life extraneous to the world in favour of an immanent principle.
The old arguments of Aristotle and the old measurements of Ptolemy were used by Toscanelli and Columbus in urging a westward voyage to India; and mainly on this account did the Revival of crossing of the Atlantic rank higher in the history of geography.
Some of these are printed in the early Latin editions of Aristotle's works.
Reason is in his idea not the individual reason, but the fountain of natural truth, whose chief channels are the various systems of heathen philosophy, and more especially the thoughts of Plato and the methods of Aristotle.
His work is not essentially different from that of his predecessors Rhazes and Ali; all present the doctrine of Galen, and through Galen the doctrine of Hippocrates, modified by the system of Aristotle.
The translation of Aristotle's Politics, the revision of Plato, and, above all, the translation of Thucydides many times revised, occupied several years.
The image of Jesus was crowned along with those of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.
It is generally stated that this argument was for the first time definitely formulated in Aristotle's philosophy.
Free will is shaping itself towards discussion in Aristotle's Ethics, but is hardly yet a formulated problem.
Aristotle's distinction of form and matter, and his conception of becoming as a transition from actuality to potentiality, provides a new ontological way of conceiving the process of material and organic evolution.'
Aristotle's teleological conception of organic evolution often approaches modern mechanical conceptions.
Aristotle's brief suggestions respect ing the origin of society and governments in the Politics show a leaning to a naturalistic interpretation of human history as a development conditioned by growing necessities.
Of Aristotle's immediate successors one deserves to be noticed here, namely, Strato of Lampsacus, who developed his master's cosmology into a system of naturalism.
In a well-known note to Charles Leopold Laurillard's Eloge, prefixed to the last edition of the Ossemens fossiles, the " radical de l'etre " is much the same thing as Aristotle's " particula genitalis " and Harvey's " ovum."
In the first half of the 13th century, Abraham ibn Ilasdai, a vigorous supporter of Maimonides, translated (or adapted) a large number of philosophical works from Arabic, among them being the Sepher ha-tappuah, based on Aristotle's de Anima, and the Mozene Zedeq of Ghazzali on moral philosophy, of both of which the originals are lost.
He wrote numerous translations, of Galen, Aristotle, Ilariri, IIunain ben Isaac and Maimonides, as well as several original works, a Sepher Anaq in imitation of Moses ben Ezra, and treatises on grammar and medicine (Rephuath geviyyah), but he is best known for his Talzkemoni, a diwan in the style of Ilariri's Magimat.
Even amidst the cares of the consulship he found time for commenting on the Categories of Aristotle.
He formed the resolution to translate all the works of Aristotle and all the dialogues of Plato, and to reconcile the philosophy of Plato with that of Aristotle.
He translated into Latin Aristotle's Analytica Priora et Posteriora, the Topica, and Elenchi Sophistici; and he wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Categories, on his book lrEpi Epµnvcias, also a commentary on the Isagoge of Porphyrius.
These works formed to a large extent the source from which the middle ages derived their knowledge of Aristotle.
But, when increased knowledge of Aristotle's texts (and of the commentaries) led to the victory of a supposed Aristotelianism over a supposed Platonism, Albertus Magnus, and his still more distinguished pupil Thomas Aquinas, mark certain doctrines as belonging to faith but not to reason.
Aristotle's term was adopted by Linnaeus (1758), and has been universally used by zoologists.
See the instructive passage in Aristotle, Nic. Eth.
Part of his writings consist of commentaries on the portions of Aristotle then known, or rather of commentaries on the commentaries of Averroes.
Instead of reading Aristotle and other naturalists, people went for information to commonplace books like those of Aelian, in which scraps of folk-lore, travellers' tales and fragments of misapprehended science were set forth in an elegant style.
Imported vases of the second half of the 5th century B.C. prove the existence of trade with Greece at that period; and the town was famous in Aristotle's day for a special breed of fowls.
The date of this interview is probably determined by the fact that Aristotle visited his friend Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, in 347-345 B.C. There is no reason to doubt the probability or even the accuracy of the narrative.
This last tradition, which was received as an undoubted fact both by Thucydides and Aristotle, has during the last few years received striking confirmation.
It was owing to the want of this that the Cretans scarcely figure in Greek history as a people, though the island, as observed by Aristotle, would seem from its natural position calculated to exercise a preponderating influence over Greek affairs.
In 1492 he again travelled in Italy, studying in Florence, Rome and Venice, making himself familiar with the writings of Aristotle, though greatly influenced by the Platonic philosophy.
Whereas Plato's main problem had been the organization of the perfect state, and Aristotle's intellect had ranged with fresh interest over all departments of the knowable, political speculation had become a mockery with the extinction of free political life, and knowledge as such had lost its freshness for the Greeks of the Roman Empire.
These, with an account of Aristotle's Logic appended to Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man (1774), conclude the list of works published in Reid's lifetime.
When he was beginning his first lecture at Pisa he opened the meteorological treatises of Aristotle.
His father's History of India was published in 1818; immediately thereafter, about the age of twelve, John began a thorough study of the scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original.
The ten books of Stromata (in which Origen compared the teaching of the Christians with that of the philosophers, and corroborated all the Christian dogmas from Plato, Aristotle, Numenius and Cornutus) have all perished, with the exception of small fragments; so have the tractates on the resurrection and on freewill.2 6.
Cardinal Bessarion became his disciple; he produced a great impression upon Cosimo de' Medici; and though not himself making any very important contribution to the study of Plato, he effectually shook the exclusive domination which Aristotle had exercised overEuropean thought for eight centuries.
The chief authority for the bishop's life is William de Chambre (printed in Wharton's Anglia Sacra, 1691, and in Historiae Dunelmensis scriptores tres, Surtees Soc. 1839), who describes him as an amiable and excellent man, charitable in his diocese, and the liberal patron of many learned men, among these being Thomas Bradwardine, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Fitzralph, afterwards archbishop of Armagh, the enemy of the mendicant orders, Walter Burley, who translated Aristotle, John Mauduit the astronomer, Robert Holkot and Richard de Kilvington.
Aristotle was the first serious author on ornithology with whose writings we are acquainted, but even he had, as he tells us, predecessors; and, looking to that portion of his works on animals which has come down to us, one Early s.
Sundevall - equally proficient in classical as in ornithological knowledge - was, in 1863, compelled to leave more than a score of the birds of which Aristotle wrote unidentified.
The twenty-six books De Animalibus of Albertus Magnus (Groot), printed in 1478, are founded mainly on Aristotle.
The revival of learning was at hand, and William Turner, a Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecution at home, printed at Cologne in 1544 the first commentary on the birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern naturalists.'
Aristotle was known but in part, and that part was rendered well-nigh unintelligible through the vileness of the translations; yet not one of those professors would learn Greek.
This anonymous writer,' he says, acquired his learning by teaching others, and adopted a dogmatic tone, which has caused him to be received at Paris with applause as the equal of Aristotle, Avicenna, or Averroes.
The treatise opens with an able sketch of psychology, founded upon, but in some important respects varying from, Aristotle's De Anima.
Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (c. 22) gives a.
He is more important, however, as a commentator and scholar, and made valuable contributions to the study of Aristotle.
The controversy between nominalists and realists arose from a passage in Boethius' translation of Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, which propounded the problem of genera and species, (1) as to whether they subsist in themselves or only in the mind; (2) whether, if subsistent, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and (3) whether separated from sensible things or placed in them.
The science of insects began with Aristotle, who included in a class "Entoma" the true insects, the arachnids and the myriapods, the Crustacea forming another class ("Malacostraca") of the "Anaema" or "bloodless animals."
For nearly 2000 years the few writers who dealt with zoological subjects followed Aristotle's leading.
Aristotle and Harvey (De generatione animalium, 1651) had considered the insect larva as a prematurely hatched embryo and the pupa as a second egg.
To portions of these Aristotle has been supposed to have been indebted for his doctrine of the categories and some of his chief ethical theories.
It is important to notice that Archytas must have been famous as a philosopher, inasmuch as Aristotle wrote a special treatise (not extant) On the Philosophy of Archytas.
The Lyceum, where Aristotle taught, was originally a sanctuary of Apollo Lyceius.
Maimonides had brought Jewish thought entirely under the domination of Aristotle.
In the view of some alchemists, the ultimate principles of matter were Aristotle's four elements; the proximate constituents were a " sulphur " and a " mercury," the father and mother of the metals; gold was supposed to have attained to the perfection of its nature by passing in succession through the forms of lead, brass and silver; gold and silver were held to contain very pure red sulphur and white quicksilver, whereas in the other metals these materials were coarser and of a different colour.
Dicaearcus of Messana in Sicily, a pupil of Aristotle (326-296 B.C.), is the author of a topographical account of Hellas, with maps, of which only fragments are preserved; he is credited with having estimated the size of the earth, and, as far as known he was the first to draw a parallel across a map. 4 This parallel, or dividing line, called diaphragm (partition) by a commentator, extended due east from the Pillars of Hercules, through the Mediterranean, and along the Taurus and Imaus (Himalaya) to the eastern ocean.
He was taught first by his father Spintharus, a pupil of Socrates, and later by the Pythagoreans, Lamprus of Erythrae and Xenophilus, from whom he learned the theory of music. Finally he studied under Aristotle at Athens, and was deeply annoyed, it is said, when Theophrastus was appointed head of the school on Aristotle's death.
His writings, said to have numbered four hundred and fifty-three, were in the style of Aristotle, and dealt with philosophy, ethics and music. The empirical tendency of his thought is shown in his theory that the soul is related to the body as harmony to the parts of a musical.
Plato condemned the practice, which the theory of Aristotle also by implication sets aside as inadmissible, of Greeks having Greeks for slaves.
A fragment of Philemon declares, as if in reply to Aristotle, that not nature, but fortune, makes the slave.
This work not only criticizes and comments on the theories of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, but also deduces from them a modern philosophical system.
Glanvill supported a much more honourable cause when he undertook the defence of the Royal Society of London, under the title of Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Science since the time of Aristotle (1668), a work which shows how thoroughly he was imbued with the ideas of the empirical method.
For practical purposes Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter (An) and form (Ettos).
It is true that several of the Neoplatonists professed to accept all the teaching both of Plato and of Aristotle, whereas, in fact, they arbitrarily interpreted Aristotle so as to make him agree with Plato, and Plato so as to make his teachings consistent with the Oriental doctrines which they had adopted, in the same manner as the schoolmen attempted to reconcile Aristotle with the doctrines of the church.
And Chronological Notes The most conspicuous property of the lodestone, its attraction for iron, appears to have been familiar to the Greeks at least as early as 800 B.C., and is mentioned by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and others.
In Aristotle the Xl yos of a thing is its definition, including its formal cause, while the ultimate principles of a science are apxal, the "reasons" (in a common modern sense) which explain all its particular facts.'
Nois in Plato and Aristotle is used both widely for all the meanings which "reason" can have, and strictly for the faculty which apprehends intuitively.
In his philosophy he was mainly concerned to defend Plato against the followers of Aristotle.
In the earlier treatise he attacks the life and character of Aristotle, impugns the authenticity of almost all his works, and attempts to refute his doctrines from a theological standpoint.
Fuller discussions of the gerousia will be found in Aristotle, Politics, ii.
Or we might say with equal truth that the philosophy of St Thomas is Aristotle Christianized.
The scholastic systems are not the free products of speculation; in the main they are summae theologiae, or they are modified versions of Aristotle.
A single sentence in Porphyry's Isagoge or " introduc tion " to the Categories of Aristotle furnished the i o, s text of the discussion.
In translations they had only the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle in the versions of Boetius, the Timaeus of Plato in the version of Chalcidius, and Boetius's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge.
The other tract, known as Categoriae decem, and taken at first for a translation of Aristotle's treatise, is really a rapid summary of it, and certainly does not belong to Augustine.
Boetius ends by declining to adjudicate between Plato and Aristotle, remarking in a semi-apologetic style that, if he has expounded Aristotle's opinion by preference, his course is justified by the fact that he is commenting upon an introduction to Aristotle.
The collected works of Hrabanus himself contain nothing new, but in some glosses on Aristotle and Porphyry, first exhumed by Cousin, there are several noteworthy expressions of opinion in a Nominalistic sense.
Bernard of Chartres, at the beginning of the 12th century, endeavoured, according to John of Salisbury, to reconcile Plato and Aristotle; but his doctrine is almost wholly derived from the former through St Augustine and the commentary of Chalcidius.
But he modifies his Nominalism so as to approach, though somewhat vaguely, to the position of Aristotle himself.
The Summists have as much to say against the existence of God as for it, and the dialecticians, having gone to school to the pagans, have forgotten over Aristotle the way of salvation.
The doctrines and the works the works of Aristotle had been transmitted by the of Aris- Nestorians to the Arabs, and among those kept alive by a tole.
The unification by the last-mentioned of Aristotle's active intellect in all men, and his consequent denial of individual immortality are well known.
Accepted at first as Aristotle's, and actually printed in the first Latin editions of his works, the book is in reality an Arabian compilation of Neoplatonic theses.
The apocryphal Neoplatonic treatises and the First views of the Arabian commentators obscured for the effects of first students the genuine doctrine of Aristotle, and the the new 13th century opens with quite a crop of mystical knowledge.
The spread of the Amalrican doctrine led to fierce persecutions, and the provincial council which met at Paris in 1209 expressly decreed " that neither the books of Aristotle on natural philosophy, nor commentaries on the same, should be read, whether publicly or privately, at Paris."
Finally, in 1254, we find the university officially prescribing how many hours are to be devoted to the explanation of the Metaphysics and the principal physical treatises of Aristotle.
Growing knowledge of Aristotle's works and the multiplication of translations enabled students to tendency.
The perils of dialectic are distinguish the genuine Aristotle from the questionable accompaniments with which he had made his first appearance in Western Europe.
Fresh translations of Aristotle and Averroes had already been made from the Arabic (IIepi ret ivropiat from the Hebrew) by Michael Scot, and Hermannus Alamannus, at the instance of the emperor Frederick II.; so that the whole body of Aristotle's works was at hand in Latin translations from about 1210 to 1225.
The earlier doctors who avail themselves of Aristotle's works, while bowing to his authority implicitly in matters of logic, are generally found defending a Christianized Platonism against the doctrine of the Metaphysics.
This was a natural result of acquaintance with Aristotle's De anima and the numerous Greek and Arabian commentaries upon it, and it is observable in most of the writers that have still to be mentioned.
Like his master, he defended Plato - or what he considered to be the Platonic theory - against the attacks of Aristotle.
Thus he defended the universalia ante rem as exemplars existent in the divine intelligence, and censured Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity of the world.
Robert Grosseteste, important in the sphere of ecclesiastical politics, has been already mentioned as active in procuring translations of Aristotle from the Greek.
He also wrote commentaries on logical and physical works of Aristotle.
The monotheistic influence of Aristotle and his Arabian commentators shows itself in Albert and Aquinas, at the outset, in the definitive fashion in which the " mysteries " y sof the Trinity and the Incarnation are henceforth detached from the sphere of rational or philosophical theology.
The existence of God is maintained by Albert and Aquinas to be domonstrable by reason; but here again they reject the ontological argument of Anselm, and restrict themselves to the a posteriori proof, rising after the manner of Aristotle from that which is prior for us to that which is prior by nature or in itself.
Here the Scholastic philosophy comes into conflict with Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity of the world.
The universals, therefore, have no existence, as universals, in rerum natura; and Thomas endorses, in this sense, the polemic of Aristotle against Plato's hypostatized abstractions.
Aquinas regards the souls of men, like the angels, as immaterial forms; and he includes in the soul-unit, so to speak, not merely the anima rationalis of Aristotle, but also the vegetative, sensitive, appetitive and motive functions.
Occam reproaches the " modern Platonists " for perverting the Aristotelian doctrine by these speculations, and claims the authority of Aristotle for his own Nominalistic doctrine.
It is perhaps the most important work of its kind between Aristotle and modern writers.
Though he was much indebted to Aristotle he used the material to advantage, adding much from his own experience and historical knowledge.
In many respects Wotton was simply an exponent of Aristotle, whose teaching, with various fanciful additions, constituted the real basis of zoological knowledge throughout the middle ages.
It was Wotton's merit that he rejected the legendary and fantastic accretions, and returned to Aristotle and the observation of nature.
The most ready means of noting the progress of zoology during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is to compare the Aristotle's classificatory conceptions of successive naturalists classifi- with those which are to be found in the works of cation.
Wotton follows Aristotle 1 in the division of animals into the Enaema and the Anaema, and in fact in the recognition of all the groups above given, adding only one large group to those recognized by Aristotle under the Anaema, modifica- namely, the group of Zoophyta, in which Wotton includes the Holothuriae, Star-Fishes, Medusae, Sea-Anemones and Sponges.
He also made If we remember that by " blood " Aristotle understood " red blood," and that he did not know of the existence of colourless blood, his primary division is not a bad one.
He produced in the end a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle with an admixture of Pythagorean or Oriental mysticism, and is closely allied to the Alexandrian school of thought.
He recognized also Ideas and Matter, and borrowed largely from Aristotle and the Stoics.
Neckam also wrote Corrogationes Promethei, a scriptural commentary prefaced by a treatise on grammatical criticism; a translation of Aesop into Latin elegiacs (six fables from this version, as given in a Paris MS., are printed in Robert's Fables inedites); commentaries, still unprinted, on portions of Aristotle, Martianus Capella and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and other works.
His pupil Richer has left us a detailed account of his system of teaching at Reims. So far as the trivium is concerned, his text-books were Victorinus's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge, Aristotle's Categories, and Cicero's Topics with Manlius's Commentaries.
Among the Greeks and Romans various speculations as to the cause of the how were indulged in; Aristotle, in his Meteors, erroneously ascribes it to the reflection of the sun's rays by the rain; Seneca adopted the same view.
The colours are much fainter, and according to Aristotle, who claims to be the first observer of this phenomenon, the lunar bows are only seen when the moon is full.
He may possibly have translated a work of Aristotle.'
Among the works which he translated into Syriac and of which his versions survive are treatises of Aristotle, Porphyry and Galen, 3 the Ars grammatica of Dionysius Thrax, the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, and possibly two or three treatises of Plutarch.4 His own original works are less important, but include a " treatise on logic, addressed to Theodore (of Merv), which is unfortunately imperfect, a tract on negation and affirmation; a treatise, likewise addressed to Theodore, On the Causes of the Universe, according to the Views of Aristotle, showing how it is a Circle; a tract On Genus, Species and Individuality; and a third tract addressed to Theodore, On the Action and Influence of the Moon, explanatory and illustrative of Galen's IIEpi rcptaiµwv r t µepwv, bk.
According to Aristotle, "the first of Eleatic unitarians was not careful to say whether the unity which he postulated was finite or infinite, but, contemplating the whole firmament, declared that the One is God."
Aristotle, in a passage already cited, Metaphysics, A5, speaks of Xenophanes as the first of the Eleatic unitarians, adding that his monotheism was reached through the contemplation of the oupavos.
The demonstrations of the unity and the attributes of God, with which the treatise De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgia (now no longer ascribed to Aristotle or Theophrastus) accredits Xenophanes, are plainly framed on the model of Eleatic proofs of the unity and the attributes of the Ent, and must therefore be set aside.
Though none of Aristotle's writings are strictly medical, he has by his researches in anatomy and physiology contributed greatly to the progress of medicine.
The fruit of Aristotle's teaching and example was seen later on in the schools of Alexandria.
When the Arabs possessed themselves of the scattered remains of Greek culture, the works of Galen were more highly esteemed than any others except those of Aristotle.
Alexander of Aphrodisias, who lived and wrote at Athens in the time of Septimius Severus, is best known by his commentaries on Aristotle, but also wrote a treatise on fevers, still extant.
The work by which he is chiefly known, the celebrated "canon," is an encyclopaedia of medical and surgical knowledge, founded upon Galen, Aristotle, the later Greek physicians, and the earlier Arabian writers, singularly complete and systematic, but is thought not to show the practical experience of its author.
In spite, therefore, of the encyclopaedic tradition which has persisted from Aristotle through the Arab and medieval schools down to Herbert Spencer, it is forced upon us in our own day that in a pursuit so manysided as medicine, whether in its scientific or in its practical aspect, we have to submit more and more to that division of labour which has been a condition of advance in all other walks of life.
The ancient Zend name is, according to Rawlinson, Paresina, the essential part of Paropamisus; this accounts for the great Asiastic Parnassus of Aristotle, and the Pho-lo-sin-a of Hsiian Tsang.
Aristotle refers to brass as the "metal of the Mosynoeci," 2 which is produced as a bright and light-coloured XaXK6s, not by addition of tin, but by fusing up with an earth.
Snellius, Arminius's old patron, now removed to Leiden, expounded the Ramist philosophy, and did his best to start his students on the search after truth, unimpeded by the authority of Aristotle.
See Cicero, De Fato, 6, 7, 9; Aristotle, Metaphysica, 0 3; Sext.
Archbishop Peckham, or Pisanus, in his Perspectiva Communis (1279), and Vitello, in his Optics (1270), also attempted the solution of Aristotle's problem, but unsuccessfully.
He was the first correctly to solve Aristotle's problem, stated above, and to apply it practically to solar observations in a darkened room (Cosmographia, 1 535).
Sir Isaac Newton, in his Opticks (1704), explains the principle of the camera obscura with single convex lens and its analogy with vision in illustration of his seventh axiom, which aptly embodies the correct solution of Aristotle's old problem.
His reading ranges from Arabian philosophers and naturalists to Aristotle, Eusebius, Cicero, Seneca, Julius Caesar (whom he calls Julius Celsus), and even the Jew, Peter Alphonso.
Thence he journeyed to Bagdad, where he learned Arabic and gave himself to the study of mathematics, medicine and philosophy, especially the works of Aristotle.
Even as a boy he had intense pleasure in reading St Thomas Aquinas and the Arab commentators of Aristotle, was skilled in the subtleties of the schools, wrote verses, studied music and design, and, avoiding society, loved solitary rambles on the banks of the Po.
Comte thought almost as meanly of Plato as he did of Saint-Simon, and he considered Aristotle the prince of all true thinkers; yet their vital difference about Ideas did not prevent Aristotle from calling Plato master.
On the occasion of taking his degree (1536) he actually took as his thesis "Everything that Aristotle taught is false."
Ramus also set the modern fashion of deducing the figures from the position of the middle term in the premises, instead of basing them, as Aristotle does, upon the different relation of the middle to the so-called major and minor term.
His chief work was the arrangement of the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus with materials supplied to him by Tyrannion.
Two treatises are sometimes erroneously attributed to him, one on the Emotions, the other a commentary on Aristotle's Ethics (really by Constantine Palaeocappa in the 16th century, or by John Callistus of Thessalonica).
The Sophists and the Sceptics, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans took up the question, and from the time of Locke and Kant it has been prominent in modern philosophy.
It is believed to have been in use from the very time of its origin; for the observations of eclipses which were collected in Chaldaea by Callisthenes, the general of Alexander, and transmitted by him to Aristotle, were for the greater part referred to the beginning of the reign of Nabonassar, founder of the kingdom of the Babylonians.
He deposed or killed many Greek dynasts, among them the famous Hermias of Atarneus, the protector of Aristotle, who had friendly relations with Philip (342 B.C.).
In this spirit he wrote commentaries upon portions of Aristotle, and upon the Summa of Aquinas, and towards the end of his life made a careful translation of the Old and New Testaments, excepting Solomon's Song, the Prophets and the Revelation of St John.
In this way he restored the right method of study, a method which had been neglected since the days of Aristotle.
The discoveries of Copernicus were eagerly accepted by him, and he used them as the lever by which to push aside the antiquated system that had come down from Aristotle, for whom, indeed, he had a perfect hatred.
Indeed, there still existed on the statute a provision that "Masters and Bachelors who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence, and for every fault committed against the logic of the Organon."
From the hypothesis of an external world a series of contradictions are deduced, such as that the world is both finite and infinite, is movable and immovable, &c.; and finally, Aristotle and various other philosophers are quoted, to show that the external matter they dealt with, as mere potentiality, is just nothing at all.
On the expulsion of the younger Dionysius, he returned to Athens, and, finding it impossible to profess philosophy publicly owing to the contempt of Plato and Aristotle, was compelled to teach privately.
This was the state of opinion when the celebrated arguments against the possibility of motion, of which that of Achilles and the tortoise is a specimen, were propounded by Zeno, and such, apparently, continued to be the state of opinion till Aristotle pointed out that time is divisible without limit, in precisely the same sense that space is.
Aristotle himself used "dialectic," as opposed to "science," for that department of mental activity which examines the presuppositions lying at the back of all the particular sciences.
To this general subject matter Aristotle gives the name "Topics" (TOroc, loci, communes loci).
Aristotle also uses the term for the science of probable reasoning as opposed to demonstrative reasoning (a7robECKTCK?7).
In 1703 Bengel left Stuttgart and entered the university of Tubingen, where, in his spare time, he devoted himself specially to the works of Aristotle and Spinoza, and in theology to those of Philipp Spener, Johann Arndt and August Franke.
Philadelphus (285-247), whose librarian was the celebrated Callimachus, bought up all Aristotle's collection of books, and also introduced a number of Jewish and Egyptian works.
Nicolaus also wrote comedies and tragedies, paraphrased and wrote commentaries on parts of Aristotle, and was himself the author of philosophical treatises.
He had, however, already begun to look sourly upon Aristotle and the current scholastic theology, which he believed hid the simple truth of the gospel and the desperate state of mankind, who were taught a vain reliance upon outward works and ceremonies, when the only safety lay in throwing oneself on God's mercy.
This is what Aristotle means by claiming for Socrates that he was the founder of definition.
On one side of his thought Aristotle represents a reaction against idealism and a return to the position of common-sense.
Still more manifestly in his Ethics and Politics Aristotle makes it clear that it is the common or universal will that gives substance and reality to the individual.
Yet besides the particular contribution that Aristotle made to idealistic philosophy in his logical and ethical interpretations, he advanced the case in two directions.
These truths, however, were hidden from Aristotle's successors, who for the most part lost the thread which Socrates had put into their hand.
When the authority of Aristotle was again invoked, it was its dualistic and formal, not its idealistic and metaphysical, side that was in harmony with the spirit of the age.
The patriotic action of the council and its attendant popularity enabled it to recover considerable administrative control, which it continued to exercise for the next eighteen years, although its deterioration in ability, becoming every year more noticeable, as well as the rapid rise of democratic ideas, prevented it from fully re-establishing the supremacy which Aristotle, with some exaggeration, attributes to it for this period.
He may also have composed at Thurii that special work on the history of Assyria to which he twice refers in his first book, and which is quoted by Aristotle.
They spent their energy in attacking Plato and Aristotle, and hence earned the opprobrious epithet of Eristic. They used their dialectic subtlety to disprove the possibility of motion and decay; unity is the negation of change, increase and decrease, birth and death.
Like Aristotle, he insists that virtue, being relative, cannot be ascribed to God.
Polemon, Aristotle and Adamantius may also be named as having dealt with the subject; as also have the medical writers of Greece and Rome - Hippocrates, Galen and Paulus Aegineta, and in later times the Arabian commentators on these authors.
On his release he withdrew to Bruges, where he devoted himself to the composition of numerous works, chiefly directed against the scholastic philosophy and the preponderant authority of Aristotle.
Aristotle, however, discerned Theramenes' real policy, and, like Cicero and Caesar, in later years ranked him among the greatest Athenian statesmen.
Such was the condition of things in Greece, as considered by Aristotle in his Politics.
Sovereignty is used in a further sense when Plato and Aristotle speak of the sovereignty of the laws (Laws, 4.715; Politics, 4.4; 3.15).
Theophrastus, who succeeded Aristotle in his school in the 114th Olympiad, frequently mentions the sexes of plants, but he does not appear to have determined the organs of reproduction.
On these the brown bear (Ursus arctus, - tipKros of Aristotle) is found in one or other of its varieties all over the temperate and north temperate regions of the eastern hemisphere, from Spain to Japan.
His principal works, besides the translation of Aristotle and a number of studies connected with the same subject, are Des Vedas (1854), Du Bouddhisme (1856) and Mahomet et le Coran (1865).
But with these insignificant exceptions it holds true that, after the sceptical wave marked by the Sophists, scepticism does not reappear till after the exhaustion of the Socratic impulse in Aristotle.
Philosophical truth, as deduced from the teaching of Aristotle, it was said, directly contradicts the teaching of the church, which determines truth in theology; but the contradiction leaves the authority of the latter unimpaired in its own sphere.
Aristotle is commonly supposed to be the first author who mentions a parrot; but this is an error, for nearly a century earlier Ctesias in his Indica (cap. 3),2 under the name of fib-Taws (Bittacus), so neatly described a bird which could speak an "Indian" language - naturally, as he seems to have thought - or Greek - if it had been taught so to do - about as big as a sparrow-hawk (Hierax), with a purple face and a black beard, otherwise blue-green (cyaneus) and vermilion in colour, so that there cannot be much risk in declaring that he must have had before him a male example of what is now commonly known as the Blossom-headed parakeet, and to ornithologists as Palaeornis cyanocephalus, an inhabitant of many parts of India.
After Ctesias comes Aristotle's /iLTT LKl (Psittace), which Sundevall supposes him to have described only from hearsay.
He was educated principally at Padua, where he received instruction in Aristotle's writings.
The whole of Aristotle's works, presented in the Latin translations and notes of the Arabian commentators, were by him digested, interpreted and systematized in accordance with church doctrine.
The philosophical works, occupying the first six and the last of the twenty-one volumes, are generally divided according to the Aristotelian scheme of the sciences, and consist of interpretations and condensations of Aristotle's relative works, with supplementary discussions depending on the questions then agitated, and occasionally divergences from the opinions of the master.
His industry in every department was great, and though we find in his system many of those gaps which are characteristic of scholastic philosophy, yet the protracted study of Aristotle gave him a great power of systematic thought and exposition, and the results of that study, as left to us, by no means warrant the contemptuous title sometimes given him - the "Ape of Aristotle."
Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate " canon.
He is a link between the ancient world and the middle ages, having been the last of the learned Romans who understood the language and studied the literature of Greece, and the first to interpret to the middle ages the logical treatises of Aristotle.
The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch's Lives, and, above all, Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.
At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the Nestorian Christians.
The Arabic translations of Aristotle passed from the East to the West by being transmitted through the Arab dominions in northern Africa to Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century.
In the 12th century Toledo was the centre of the study of Aristotle in the West, and it was from Toledo that the knowledge of Aristotle spread to Paris and to other seats of learning in western Europe.
The Schoolmen devoted most of their attention to Aristotle, and we may here briefly note the successive stages in their gradually increasing knowledge of his works.
During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between the early translations of Aristotle executed at Toledo about 1150 and the death in 1281 of William of Moerbeke, the translator of the Rhetoric and the Politics, the knowledge of Aristotle had been greatly extended in Europe by means of translations, first from the Arabic, and, next, from the original Greek.
The medieval dependence on the authority of Aristotle gradually diminished.
For Aristotle, as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Dante has the highest regard.
To the Latin transla tions of Aristotle and to his interpreters he refers in more than three hundred passages, while the number of his references to the Latin translation of the Timaeus of Plato is less than ten.
In contrast with the Schoolmen of the middle ages, he has no partiality for Aristotle.
The translation of Aristotle was entrusted to three of the learned Greeks who had already arrived in Italy, Trapezuntius, Gaza and Bessarion, while other authors were undertaken by Italian scholars such as Guarino, Valla, Decembrio and Perotti.
Among the scholars of Italian birth, probably the only one in this age who rivalled the Greeks as a public expositor of their own literature was Politian (1454-1494), who lectured on Homer and Aristotle in Florence, translated Herodian, and was specially interested in the Latin authors of the Silver Age and in the text of the Pandects of Justinian.
In 1494-1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less than twenty-seven editiones principes of Greek authors and of Greek works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus.
They have found themselves living in a new age of editiones principes, and have eagerly welcomed the first publication of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens (1891), Herondas (1891) and Bacchylides (1897), as well as the Persae of Timotheus of Miletus (5903), with some of the Paeans of Pindar (5907) and large portions of the plays of Menander (1898-1899 and 5907).
Aristotle, as usual, adopted "eudaemonia" as the term which in popular language most nearly represented his idea and made it the keyword of his ethical doctrine.
Aristotle further held that the good man in achieving virtue must experience pleasure (iiSov17), which is, therefore, not the same as, but the sequel to or concomitant of eudaemonia.
Among modern writers, James Seth (Ethical Princ., 1894) resumes Aristotle's position, and places Eudaemonism as the mean between the Ethics of Sensibility (hedonism) and the Ethics of Rationality, each of which overlooks the complex character of human life.
Judged from the standpoint of empirical science, philosophy passed its meridian in Plato and Aristotle, declined in the post-Aristotelian systems, and set in the darkness of Neoplatonism.
The systems of Plato and Aristotle sought to adjust the rival claims of physics and ethics (although the supremacy of the latter was already acknowledged); but the popular religions were thrown overboard.
It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.
Fourthly, the study of Aristotle also exercised an influence on Neoplatonism.
The most distinguished teachers at Athens were Plutarch (q.v.), his disciple Syrianus (who did important work as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, and further deserves mention for his vigorous defence of the freedom of the will), but above all Proclus (411-485).
They not only formed one of the bridges by which the medieval thinkers got back to Plato and Aristotle; they determined the scientific method of thirty generations, and they partly created and partly nourished the Christian mysticism of the middle ages.
When Justinian issued the edict for the suppression of the school, Damascius along with Simplicius (the painstaking commentator on Aristotle) and five other Neoplatonists set out to make a home in Persia.
I.-First Historic Period The scientific recognition of fossils as connected with the past history of the earth, from Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) to the beginning of the 19th century, in connexion with the rise of comparative anatomy and geology.
The Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, usually included among the works of Aristotle, is now generally admitted to be by Anaximenes, although some consider it a much later production (edition by Spengel, 1847).
It is true that pleasure is the summum bonum of Epicurus, but his conception of that pleasure is profoundly modified by the Socratic doctrine of prudence and the eudaemonism of Aristotle.
Aristotle in his Ethics stigmatizes as "extremely unloving" (Xiav a4xXov) the denial that ancestors are interested in or affected by the fortunes of their descendants; and in effect ancestor-worship is the staple of most religions, ancient or modern, civilized or savage.
The date of his birth cannot be exactly determined, but from various indications in his work it seems to have been about 63 B.C. He studied at Nysa under the grammarian Aristodemus, under Tyrannio the grammarian at Rome, under the philosopher Xenarchus either at Rome or at Alexandria, and he had studied Aristotle along with Boethus (possibly at Rome under Tyrannio, who had access to the Aristotelian writings in Sulla's library).
Aristotle, when speaking of the aristocratic character of the horse, as requiring fertile soil for its support, and consequently being associated with wealth, instances its use among the Chalcidians and Eretrians, and in the former of those two states we find a class of nobles called Hippobotae.
Well grounded in his boyhood, and thoroughly educated in his manhood, Aristotle, after Plato's death, had the further advantage of travel in his third period, when he was in his prime.
The appointment of Plato's nephew, Speusippus, to succeed his uncle in the Academy induced Aristotle and Xenocrates to leave Athens together and repair to the court of Hermias.
Aristotle admired Hermias, and married his friend's sister or niece, Pythias, by whom he had his daughter Pythias.
Aristotle is said to have written on monarchy and on colonies for Alexander; and the pupil is said to have slept with his master's edition of Homer under his pillow, and to have respected him, until from hatred of Aristotle's tactless relative, Callisthenes, who was done to death in 328, he turned at last against Aristotle himself.
Aristotle had power to teach, and Alexander to learn.
Dionysius must have spoken too strongly, when he says that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander for eight years; for in 340, when Philip went to war with Byzantium, Alexander became regent at home, at the age of sixteen.
At last, in his fourth period, after the accession of Alexander, Aristotle at fifty returned to Athens and became the head of his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium near the temple of Apollo Lyceius in the suburbs.
Indeed, according to Ammonius, Plato too had talked as he walked in the Academy; and all his followers were called Peripatetics, until, while the pupils of Xenocrates took the name " Academics," those of Aristotle retained the general name.
But Aristotle was an author as well as a lecturer; for the hypothesis that the Aristotelian writings are notes of his lectures taken down by his pupils is contradicted by the tradition of their learning while walking, and disproved by the impossibility of taking down such complicated discourses from dictation.
Moreover, it is clear that Aristotle addressed himself to readers as well as hearers, as in concluding his whole theory of syllogisms he says, " There would remain for all of you or for our hearers (763,7 co y uµWV rt T&?v ipcpoapEVwv) a duty of according to the defects of the investigation consideration, to its discoveries much gratitude " (Sophistical Elenchi, 34, 184 b 6).
In short, Aristotle was at once a student, a reader, a lecturer, a writer and a book collector.
On his first visit to Athens, during which occurred the fatal battle of Mantineia (362 B.C.), Aristotle had seen the confusion of Greece becoming the opportunity of Macedon under Philip; and on his second visit he was supported at Athens by the complete domination of Macedon under Alexander.
But on Alexander's sudden death in 323, when Athens in the Lamian war tried to reassert her freedom against Antipater, Aristotle found himself in danger.
Nicanor is to marry Pythias, Aristotle's daughter, and to take charge of Nicomachus his son.
They are to dedicate an image of Aristotle's mother, and to see that the bones of his wife Pythias are, as she ordered, taken up and buried with him.
On this will we may remark that Proxenus is said to have been Aristotle's guardian after the death of his father, and to have been the father of Nicanor; that Herpyllis of Stagira was the mother of Nicomachus by Aristotle; and that Arimnestus was the brother of Aristotle, who also had a sister, Arimneste.
So diametrical a difference could not have arisen at once_ For, though Aristotle was different from Plato, and brought with.
When Aristotle at the age of eighteen came to Athens, Plato, at the age of sixty-two, had probably written all his dialogues except the Laws; and in the course of the remaining twenty years of his life and teaching, he expounded " the socalled unwritten dogmas " in his lectures on the Good.
There was therefore a written Platonism for Aristotle to read, and an unwritten Platonism which he actually heard.
Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them (7rEpi Ta yaBoii), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his Metaphysics.
Modern critics, who were not present and knew neither, often accuse Aristotle of misrepresenting Plato.
Aristotle's critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.
Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato.
Aristotle's originality soon asserted itself in early writings, of which fragments have come down to us, and have been collected by Rose (see the Berlin edition of Aristotle's works, or more readily in the Teubner series, which we shall use for our quotations).
Many, no doubt, are spurious; but some are genuine, and a few perhaps cited in Aristotle's extant works.
A special interest attaches to the dialogues written after the manner of Plato but with Aristotle as principal interlocutor; and some of these, e.g.
It is not always certain which were dialogues, which didactic like Aristotle's later works; but by comparing those which were certainly dialogues with their companions in the list of Aristotle's books as given by Diogenes Laertius, we may conclude with Bernays that the books occurring first in that list were dialogues.
Difficult as it is to determine when Aristotle wrote all these various works, some of them indicate their dates.
Among the didactic writings, the 7rEpi TayaOoii would probably belong to the same time, because it was Aristotle's report of Plato's lectures.
On the other hand, the two political works, if written for Alexander, would be after 343-34 2 when Philip made Aristotle his tutor.
So probably were the rhetorical works, especially the Theodectea; since both politics and oratory were the subjects which the father wanted the tutor to teach his son, and, when Alexander came to Phaselis, he is said by Plutarch (Alexander, 17) to have decorated the statue of Theodectes in honour of his association with the man through Aristotle and philosophy.
On the whole, then, it seems as if Aristotle began with dialogues during his second period under Plato, but gradually came to prefer writing didactic works, especially in the third period after Plato's death, and in connexion with Alexander.
These early writings show clearly how Aristotle came to depart from Plato.
In the first place as regards style, though the Stagirite pupil Aristotle could never rival his Attic master in literary form, yet he did a signal service to philosophy in gradually passing from the vague generalities of the dialogue to the scientific precision of the didactic treatise.
The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subjectmatter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit.
Plato's theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected Aristotle himself.
Aristotle in the Eudemus, written about 352, when he was thirty-two, also believed in it.
Here we can read the young Aristotle, writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius.
Nothing could be more like Plato's Phaedo, or more unlike Aristotle's later work on the Soul, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next life to sink into the background.
This is indeed a doctrine of Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved.
Thus we find that at first, under the influence of his master, Aristotle held somewhat ascetic views on soul and body and on goods of body and estate, entirely opposed both in psychology and in ethics to the moderate doctrines of his later writings.
If, wrote Aristotle, the forms are another sort of number, not mathematical, there would be no understanding of it.
Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in Plato's lifetime, to oppose.
Aristoxenus, at the beginning of the second book of the Harmonics,, gives a graphic account of the astonishment caused by these lectures, of Plato, and of their effect on the lectures of Aristotle.
From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were son, different, that their philosophies must diverge'; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards thenatural, the substantial, the scientific.
Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato, was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics.
He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.
Still more marked was his departure from Plato as regards rhetoric. Plato in the Gorgias, (501 A) had contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice (rpt/37) KaL Epirecpia); Aristotle in the Gryllus (Fragm.
On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics.
Composition Of His Extant Works The system which was taught by Aristotle at Athens in the fourth period of his life, and which is now known as the Aristototelian philosophy, is contained not in fragments but in extant books.
On the one hand, there is the curious story given partly by Strabo (608-609) and partly in Plutarch's Sulla (c. 26), that Aristotle's successor Theophrastus left the books of both to their joint pupil, Neleus of Scepsis, where they were hidden in a cellar, till in Sulla's time they were sold to Apellicon, who made new copies, transferred after Apellicon's death by Sulla to Rome, and there edited and published by Tyrannio and Andronicus.
Zeller supposes that, though Aristotle may have made preparations for his philosophical system beforehand, still the properly didactic treatises composing it almost all belong to the last period of his life, i.e.
This easily passes into the further and still more sceptical hypothesis that the works, as we have them, under Aristotle's name, are rather the works of the Peripatetic school, from Aristotle, Theophrastus and Eudemus downwards.
Shute in his History of the Aristotelian Writings (p. 176), " that we have even got throughout a treatise in the exact words of Aristotle, though we may be pretty clear that we have a fair representation of his thought.
Such hypotheses attend to Aristotle's philosophy to the neglect of his life.
But Aristotle is graphically describing isolated events, and could hardly speak of events of 357 and 356 as happening " now " in or near 335.
Indeed, the whole truth about this great work is that it remained unfinished at Aristotle's death.
The logical conclusion is that Aristotle began writing it as early as 357, and continued writing it in 346, in 336, and so on till he died.
It follows that Aristotle, from early manhood, not only wrote dialogues and didactic works, surviving only in fragments, but also began some of the philosophical works which are still parts of his extant writings.
However early Aristotle began a book, so long as he kept the manuscript, he could always change it.
The Metaphysics is clearly a compilation formed from essays or discourses; and it illustrates another characteristic of Aristotle's gradual method of composition.
On either alternative, however, " the first discourses " mentioned may have originally been a separate discourse; for Book F begins quite fresh with the definition of the science of being, long afterwards called " Metaphysics," and Book Z begins Aristotle's fundamental doctrine of substance.
Indeed, they sometimes divide Aristotle's works into notes (ii roµvrjµaTuca) and compilations (avvraypartKb.).
If then Aristotle was for some thirty-five years gradually and simultaneously composing manuscript discourses into treatises and treatises into a system, he was pursuing a process which solves beforehand the very difficulties which have since been found in his writings.
Nor is it at all absurd to suppose that,long after he began the Meteorologica, Aristotle himself added the preface in the process of gathering his general treatises on natural science into a system.
There is still another point which would facilitate Aristotle's gradual composition of discourses into treatises and treatises into a system; there was no occasion for him to publish his manuscripts beyond his school.
No doubt then Aristotle's library contained published copies of the works of other authors, as well as the autographs of his own.
Publication to the world is designed for readers, who at all times have demanded popular literature rather than serious philosophy such as that of Aristotle.
Accordingly it becomes a difficult question, how far Aristotle's works were published in his lifetime.
In answering it we must be careful to exclude any evidence which refers to Aristotle as a man, not.
History comes nearer to philosophy; and Aristotle's Constitutions were known to his enemy Timaeus, who attacked him for disparaging the descent of the Locrians of Italy, according to Polybius (xii.), who defended Aristotle.
We are equally at a loss to prove that Aristotle published his philosophy.
While Aristotle did not publish his philosophical works to the world, he freely communicated them to the Peripatetic school.
It was certainly by Aristotle, because it contained the triple grammatical division of words into noun, verb and conjunction, which the history of grammar recognized as his discovery.
Similarly in astronomy, Aristotle used the assistance of Eudoxus and Callippus.
With one of his pupils in particular, Theophrastus, who was born about 370 and therefore was some fifteen years younger than himself, he had a long and intimate connexion; and the work of the pupil bears so close a resemblance to that of his master, that, even when he questions Aristotle's opinions (as he often does), he seems to be writing in an Aristotelian atmosphere; while he shows the same acuteness in raising difficulties, and has caught something of the same encyclopaedic genius.
Another pupil, Eudemus of Rhodes, wrote and thought so like his master as to induce Simplicius to call him the most genuine of Aristotle's companions (i yv170 - 1.CJTaTOS TWv 'ApLUTor XovS iraipwv).