Aristotel and his philosophy

Aristotle and His Philosophy 1

Aristotle and His Philosophy (course

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Aristotle and His Philosophy 2

Introduction

Aristotle was a materialist philosopher who developed Ethics and Logic as newly important elements of philosophy and whose thought had the most profound effect on medieval scholars

Aristotle undertook objective , scientific study of all major fields of knowledge : logic , physics , natural history , politics , ethics and the arts . He also gave an account of what he termed the First Philosophy metaphysics , and the science of being , which underlay all sciences and

was thus primary . For Aristotle , the essence of being was not perfection but change . Everything has a potential and a goal or end towards which it progresses . Man is a "political animal " who best fulfills his potential and natural end within a society with laws and customs . His highest goal is the "good life , not a life of ease , but a life of virtue that results in "eudaimonia , or having a good spirit , often translated as happiness (Kraut , 2001 . Ultimate happiness lies in pursuit of wisdom for its own sake

At a cosmic level , Aristotle conceived of an "Unmoved Mover , an initiator of all motion but perfect and unchanging itself . This is the final end towards which all things are drawn . To the medieval scholastics this was God (Atlantic Baptist University , 2006

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The Greatest Philosopher

Aristotle , whom Plato is said to have surnamed "The Intellect certainly had the loftiest mind ever known in Greece , and perhaps in the entire human race . He is the type of true philosopher who , not allowing him to be distracted by practical and political motives , lives entirely engrossed in his speculations (The Radical Academy , 2003

The Greeks Socrates , Plato and Aristotle defined virtually all of the problems of philosophy , which were very important in classical (Greek Roman ) philosophy . The branch of philosophy covered most by Aristotle is metaphysics (literally meaning after-physics . As mentioned earlier Aristotle 's best known philosophical theory is that ideal forms or ideas , such as truth or good exist in a realm not of the material world The word history comes from the ancient Greek word for knowledge attributed by Aristotle . The earth considered round (spherical ) by Aristotle and Pythagoras . And the first accurate measure was in the 3rd century B .C . when a geocentric (literally meaning-earth center developed by Aristotle as he was thinking that our earth is the center of the universe (Science Master , 2004 . From the natural philosophers through Plato he inherited the two unsolved "natural " questions such as What is the nature of reality . How do you account for change ? From the Sophists and particularly from Plato he inherited the problems of human existence : What is the nature of man ? What is his function in life

Although he can answer and reason to almost everything had , but he never dismissed the religious insight into the nature of the universe that had been Socrates contributed to his

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knowledge . Aristotle also had...