Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Aristotle Part 2 (Part 12)

A little clearer by saying this, do all of you have the concept of.

Tree in your view? Aristotle represents an empirical approach to knowledge. Over against Plato's rational approach to knowledge. Would you be able to explain why that comment is made, what it means, and what the evidence for it would be? What is an empirical approach? Over against a rational approach?

Empirical approach, you take a look and see type of attitude. You rely on the natural world and the things around you to relate how you know things and why you know things. Whereas a rational approach, you don't use your senses, you don't rely on your senses, you just rationally think through your head why certain things are the way they are.

Okay? Or if you use your senses, everything you know is not dependent on your senses. You can stop and reflect on clear concepts in their relationship to one another and find truth as well. Aristotle is obviously more empirical. He doesn't want to have a dualistic metaphysic. And so what we know, we're going to know from the natural world. That's the only world there is, right? Unless you're thought thinking itself, then everything else is part of the natural world and consequently our knowledge is going to arise in a natural way. It's going to be a look and see approach rather than a stop and think approach to philosophy. There's a famous painting by Raphael that I think it's called the School of Altons. And in it you have Plato and Aristotle discussing with each other. And people for years have interpreted the hand gesture of the two philosophers as being a significant indication of the difference between their approach to philosophy. And I think that's probably true. What you have is Plato gesturing with one finger upward. Okay? You look for the one which is outside of time and space if you're going to explain things. Aristotle, on the other hand, has his hand open, gesturing downward or in the direction of the world anyway. And so you look at the particulars in this world. Plato is a rationalist, Aristotle is an empiricist. Now we know that Aristotle had a much greater, a keener interest and an empirical approach. Because if you just look at the works of Plato and the works of Aristotle, it's a great difference. Aristotle has works on insects and animals and how chicken embryos develop and things like that. Something that was really not of interest to Plato. And though Aristotle's work on the natural world isn't always reliable and sometimes is a little embarrassing for the superstition that's built into is obvious that he did, for most of this work, rely on observation or what he thought were reports of observation of the world. He didn't sit around as an armchair philosopher speculating about what animals are like or insects are like and what forms of political government there might be in this world. He went out and he did research, to use our term. Aristotle was interested in logic. You know that because you've studied logic. You know that the science of syllogism comes from Aristotle. But during this period of Greek philosophy, it probably could be said with justice that most of the philosophers were too much interested in logical consistency, working out a system, and not enough concerned about making sure that what they said was tied to the facts that we can experience in the world that God has created. I do not want to leave my students with the impression that Christians prefer a Platonic approach or Christians prefer an Aristotelian approach to knowledge. Both of them were wrong. And their overemphasis upon stop and reflect, get a speculative metaphysic, that's Plato, or go out and look and observe how the world works. There's the empirical approach of Aristotle. Empiricism by itself cannot stand but speculation by itself. Rational reflection upon our concepts is no help either. We need not only consistency in our thinking, we also need factuality in our thinking. So Aristotle can be seen as correcting, attempting to correct Plato's too great of emphasis upon a rational epistemology and not paying enough attention to the facts of the world as we can experience and observe them. I think it's appropriate in this context to comment on what amounts to temperamental differences between Plato and Aristotle. Now, we have just said that Plato is directed toward a rational theory of knowledge. Aristotle was directed toward an empirical theory of knowledge. But then again, their theories of knowledge tie in with their views of reality, don't they? Given Plato's dualism, his view that what is intelligible is found outside of time and space, you would not expect him to put a lot of emphasis upon research into the realm of time and space, would you? Likewise, given Aristotle's view that what gives intelligibility to any particular is an imminent transcending of the particular, putting it in its natural context, the hierarchy of purposes, you wouldn't expect Aristotle to be greatly impressed with people that have these intuitive concepts that are clear and distinct and related to each other other. So their theory of knowledge and their theory of reality go hand in hand. You're not going to get somebody who has a Platonic metaphysic using an Aristotelian epistemology and vice versa. What I'm driving at in these comments is that Philosophers have worldviews, not just isolated particular insights about knowledge or about reality or about ethics. They have a total view where at least they hope what they say about reality comports with what they say about how we know about reality. So since Plato and Aristotle represent two different pagan worldviews, I think it's good for us to stop and ask, why does one person gravitate in the direction of a Platonic kind of worldview, ideals outside of this world known by reason, versus Aristotelian worldview that emphasizes particularity in the natural world known by our senses? WT Jones points out that in Plato, we find someone that's a perfectionist, who, when he talks about solutions to things, is always looking for the ideal, the way things should be if they operated properly. When Plato talks about politics, he talks about a utopian political order which even he realized could never be actualized in our experience. Aristotle, on the other hand, was not a perfectionist. He was more a realist. He was oriented toward being practical and following our observations, what we know from our experience in the world. So when Aristotle writes on politics.

He.

Goes and he examines all the different political orders that are available in his day. He doesn't stop, you know, and use first principles to determine what would be the best. He goes and he looks at what are the actual forms of government.

Does this help you get a feel.

For the temperamental differences between a Plato and an Aristotle? Plato was for the mathematical ideal. He wants something which is subject to certainty and proof and doesn't leave anything untied. It's completely neat and tidy and it's ideal. And it's against that ideal that we evaluate our fluctuating, changing experience. Aristotle, however, is not interested in a mathematical approach. Give me the ideal back on Plato. Remember I told you how I think he was really influenced by the Pythagoreans. There was something that just seemed really neat about the Pythagorean system because math was subject to, you know, precision and a nice proof of what you believe. He was oriented then toward the immaterial and the ideal. Whereas Aristotle, if anything, his model science would have been biology, not math. He wants to know this world of change. He wants to see things happen, how they happen, and understand the realm of nature round about him. Plato, in the nature of the case, is going to distinguish between the world as we experience it and the world as it should be, or the world in its conceptual purity. He's going to have two worlds. Given his temperament, Aristotle is going to say, no, don't have any Ideals out there in some irrelevant terms. Realm apart from time and space. Ideals must all be embodied. If there are universals, they are found in the particulars of this world, not outside of this world, in some realm that we recollect because our souls once lived there. Okay, so you have Aristotle the empiricist, oriented toward observation of the realm of nature, making biology, if you will, the ideal science. Set over against Plato the idealist, who has a mathematical order and tidiness, and therefore a dualistic metaphysic and a rationalistic epistemology. Okay, having said that, how does Aristotle the empiricist explain how we ever come to know forms? And it's when we ask this question that I think we pull the string that unravels everything. For Aristotle, though Aristotelians are happy enough with his answer. I think you will find this rather inadequate as an explanation. According to Aristotle, man's soul has various functions. There's a nutritive soul within us that takes care of our biological needs and so forth, requires us to sleep. There's a sensitive soul within us that enables us to see things as objects within a certain class that are colored and to interpret sounds and so forth. It's a perceptual consciousness, if you will. But then Aristotle said, there's also a rational soul within man or a rational function within the soul of man. And its job is to find what is intelligible in the world of sensation. Now, you already know the answer in general to the question, what is it that's intelligible? According to Aristotle and for Plato, what is intelligible is form, general idea, abstract, concept. That's what's intelligible. But for Aristotle, there are no universals, no forms that exist separate from the world of time and space or separate from particulars. So you don't have particulars and universals, as in Plato. The particulars are participating in their universals. For Aristotle, you only have particulars. Now, if you only have particulars, this particular person having a particular sense experience of that particular tree over there, how do I know that it's a tree? How is it intelligible? How does this empirical approach to knowledge enable you to know anything at all? Well, Aristotle had to have a psychology.

Of understanding that, a psychology of knowledge. He had to explain the process. The how? The process by which the particular mind of man learns the intelligible form of that which he's studying in the world. This process Aristotle called abstraction.

Abstraction.

When we have an experience of something.

We'Re able to remember that experience. And after We've had an experience of a number of things that have a similarity to one another. We're able to fuse together what we remember about them into a common. A lowest common denominator, if you will. A common concept of what we have experienced in the past and that which our mind is bringing together as the concept. Common concept amounts to the intelligible form or the universal. That is, in the particular. That is, we learn the generic character that is shared by the members of a class of things. Dogs, trees, ducks, whatever. We learn that generic character through observation, which enables us to abstract the form of dogness, tree ness, duckness, and whatever else.

Now, Plato.

Excuse me, we're talking about Aristotle.

Aristotle would insist that the form that.

We are intelligently in contact with the intelligible form is not a separate entity.

If he said it was separate, he.

Would be like Plato, right? The form is always embodied or embedded in the particulars, and it never exists apart from them. And yet, somehow the human mind is able to come to know the form as distinct from the particular senses experience that introduces us to the dog in particular or the tree in particular, or the duck in particular.

You can think of it in this way. When we have a sense experience of a duck, that sensation impresses itself on.

Our minds like a seal impresses itself upon wax. Now, when you take the seal and impress it on wax and you pull the seal out, does it leave? Let's say it's a seal of a. What should we say? It looks like a. Well, talk about your brain turning off a shield. You know, a family coat of arms. Okay, now, when you pull the seal out of the wax, you see an imprint of the. Of the coat of arms. Right, the shield. But do you have. Do you have something that's metal? Do you have the shield there? Do you have something which is actually red and green and so forth? No, you just have an imprint of it. So what you've left is the form in that malleable wax. In the same way Aristotle thought that particulars out in the world. I'm looking at a particular tree right now, and those sensations that are coming to me from the tree are impressing upon my malleable, rational soul, like wax, the form of tree ness. So I don't have a tree in my head, but I have the form of a tree in my head.

So let me see if I can do a little artwork for you. Up here on the board here we have a person that's not a very.

Nice nose.

Obviously, very happy, as you can see, because he's learning about the world. And this person is looking at a tree out here. Now, as he looks at this tree, an impression is made at the back of his mind. We'll say of the form of treeness. He has abstracted from the particular, not its matter. He doesn't have witness head. Now he's abstracted the form, the treeness of the tree.

We could only think about the tree if we were having a sense experience of a tree. It's not as though you could intuit the form of tree ness from the Platonic supernatural world or the world beyond nature. But when I am in the presence of a tree and I'm having an empirical experience of it, I'm observing it. My mind is able to pull the form out of it, or it impresses the form on my mind, but not the matter. And so this is Aristotle's account of how we can improve empirically, know what's intelligible about the world, how we can know forms even though we are particulars using sense experience.

Now I can hardly, in my history, in my, in my own background of the history of philosophy, I can hardly.

Think of a more ridiculous explanation, an inadequate way to account for, for your empiricism than what I've just given you. And you've all been very patient.

I think I could see it on your faces. But you're saying, okay, we're wondering how.

You can find the universal in the particular. And Aristotle just says, well, the mind does that sort of thing. What kind of explanation is that? Or gives the analogy of a seal in wax.

But of course the tree is not.

Coming up and impressing itself on wax like in my brain. So I mean, that's an analogy of some sort of.

Aristotle can tell us what kind of.

Thing it's like, but we still have some philosophical, abstract questions about whether this is a sensible explanation of anything at all. And let me try to explain to.

You what I think is wrong with it. When I see a tree, a particular tree, I'm going to write this on the board. This is a particular tree. It's not just trees in general. For Aristotle, there are no trees in general. Remember, only particular substances exist. So when I look at this particular tree, which I will label a one, what I am seeing and what my mind is capturing is not the general form. Form of tree is capturing a one. I am not pulling out a general form. I look across the street at that tree that's outside our building, and I'm.

Not looking at just a general idea of a tree.

I'm looking at a particular tree. And guess what?

When we go down the road and.

Look at the next tree, it may be a tree as well, but it doesn't look like a one across the street. So I go down the street and I look down at another tree. Now, this is a two. What I have in my mind is no longer a one. Now I have a two in my mind. You see, there's nothing obvious about this explanation. My senses experiences of particulars, not of universals. And so how has Plato.

Excuse me, I keep wanting to say Plato.

How has Aristotle given an empirical account of the intelligible form that I know? It comes down to his just saying, well, that's the way it happens. You look at it and you end up with a form in your mind rather than the particular. Now, others, like W.T. jones, who favor Aristotle, try to give him the benefit of the doubt. And they really play fast and loose, I think, with the original Aristotle. And they try to make it out as being a matter of, well, you remember a one and you remember a two, and you remember a three, and then you come up what's common to all of them. Let's try this with noses, okay? We all in this room have a nose.

We don't have any problem accepting that.

As a beginning premise. But why do we call these things that are noses noses? Where did we get the general idea of noseness? Now, if somebody says, well, here's how you got the general idea of noseness. You look at nose, we 1 and 1, nose 2 and 2, nose, 3 and 3.

You remember all these noses, and then.

You put them together and you have the general idea of a nose. Oh, yeah. Well, then I'd like somebody who has much better artistic ability than me to put the general idea of a nose up here on the board for us. You're all smirking. You know, you can't do that.

There is no general idea of a nose.

Any particular picture you have is a particular nose or a particular kind of nose, you know, Roman nose and all the other sorts of types that people.

Speak of, pug nose or snub nose or whatever.

You can't imagine that a particular picture stands for the general concept of a nose. The particular picture is what particular. It's not universal. Some people have thought, oh, what you do is you take everyone's nose that you've experienced and you just. You do away with all of the. All of the unique features of people's noses and just leave what is the general nose left. And as Jay has pointed out, you do that and you aren't going to have anything up on the board. You take the particular features of noses away and leave just the common, ordinary human nose. There is no common, ordinary human nose. And so I don't think Aristotle has given a psychological account of how I come to know the universal. It just doesn't work that way. And it doesn't work because you say, oh, there's this power of abstraction in the mind. Well, what is that power of abstraction? What's going on? The tree is not impressing itself on the wax in my head. It's not something like that. And certainly my mind is not going out there and somehow separating form from, you know, the wood and all that. So how does this take place? He hasn't given us a real adequate account. But the problem gets worse than that. See, my difficulty is not just the mechanical difficulty.

What do you mean the form is.

Being pulled out of the particular? Does the form exist in the particular? Forms are universal. What sense does it make to say that a universal exists in a particular? If it exists in a particular, then it's particular, isn't it?

To try to find a universal form.

Form in a particular tree is contradictory, isn't it? If it's a particular tree, then it cannot be the universal tree. Well, this leads to another problem. If you don't have a universal in the tree, I mean, that's talking nonsense to say that the universal is particular. If Huey, Dewey and Louis as ducks all have the universal duckness in them, then there's three universals, right? That makes no sense to say there's three universals. There's three particulars that are instances of the universal, but there's not three universals. So Aristotle's account of the universal being in the particular is a very strange notion philosophically in the first place. But if I abstract it, we don't know what that means. We've already talked about that. But if my mind somehow pulls out.

Of the particular the universal that was.

In it, contradictory though that may be, if I pull the universal out of the particular, so tree ness comes out of that particular tree, is now embedded in my mind or is found as a rational form in my mind, then do I have the universal of tree ness in my mind? Well, I'm a particular, aren't I? I've got brain cells up here. Give me credit. Got some gray matter up here. And when I have a notion of tree or a concept of tree up here, is that a universal concept or a particular concept? Well, since I'm particular The tree I'm thinking about is going to be particular.

A little clearer by saying this.

Do all of you have the concept of tree in your head? We'll just let Aristotle tell us that you abstracted it. Well, that means Pat has the universal.

Of tree in his head, and Liz.

Has the universal tree in her head, and Dr. Bonson is the universal tree in his head. Does that make sense to you that there are three universals of the tree in our individual heads? That's the same problem with the three ducks out on the pond all having duckness in them. If that's the only place where the universal is to be found, then you really got the universal repeating itself three times, in which case it's a particular universal rather than a universal. Likewise, if you've got the idea of tree in your head and I've got the idea of tree in my head, we've abstracted it. We really have two particular universal ideas of tree. Aristotle hasn't solved the problem of the one and the many at all.

He's just given us this strange idea.

That the one is many. The one universal duckness is found three times. The one universal concept of tree is found in three individual heads. I do not believe that Aristotle solved this problem, and I don't believe that any empiricist can solve this problem. If all we know are particulars, then there is no basis for saying we know universals at all. Now, what follows from my critique of empiricism? If a knowledge of particulars cannot lead to a knowledge of universals, can any.

Empiricist give us, first of all, a.

Basis for science.

Laws, generalizations, logic?

More obviously and culturally, can any empiricist.

Give us universal laws of morality? Empiricism taken seriously is going to lead to the destruction of science and morality both. Now, I'm not saying this because I think as Christians, we should be anti empirical, like certain Christian philosophers of this century. I believe we should be empirical. God created this world to be known through our senses and to be something we learn about and have dominion over and all that. But if somebody says all you know is what you learned through your senses, then all you can know are particulars. You can never learn universals, never learn general concepts. Let's talk about Aristotle's ethic before we are done. Today, Aristotle says that man, unlike animals, is able to look beyond the present experience down the line at other consequences of his choices. So even though man is an advanced animal, man has the ability to live differently than the animals by making choices contrary to present desires, man can see alternatives laid out before him. And now what man needs is a standard, a criterion by which to make these choices, to choose one alternative and reject the other. Aristotle doesn't want an ethic that comes from supernatural revelation. Remember, he's an empiricist. What we know is going to be based upon our experience and observation. So if we're going to learn about what is good and what is bad, we're going to find a standard of ethics. It's going to have to come through experience. Aristotle believes that what we learn through experience, however, will not give us precise answers in ethics. Precision is available in logic, but it's not available in ethics. We want to find out what is really good. We have to look at the opinions of men and analyze them. But this is always going to leave some room for disagreement and a lack of certainty. Geometry allows for you to prove things absolutely. Ethics does not. Ethical conclusions can never be definitive. Now, don't misunderstand this. Aristotle is not saying that ethics is completely relative. He's not saying that he's a skeptic and nothing can be known. He's saying there is a truth to be found about ethics and ethical choices, but that truth cannot be defined definitively and precisely stated. Every science needs to go through development and refining so that it better approximates reality. That's true of physics, it's true of biology, and it's true of ethics. Aristotle says we can know truths about ethics, but we are in a constant process of refining and trying to approximate the reality of what is good. When we study ethics, we take a step beyond the study of the natural world, physics or biology, according to Aristotle. Because now we're not studying simply what is the good, trying to find out the nature of reality. We're also concerned to develop good habits, to develop character, to change personally or to change the world. That is to say, ethics is practical as well as theoretical. Now, because Aristotle was developing a system of philosophy, it's not surprising that when he began to reflect on the nature of the good, the ethical good, he tried to relate his discussion to his understanding of metaphysics. We've already seen in our lectures today that Aristotle's metaphysic was a matter of finding the final form or purpose of things. And as he studied ethics, he tried to do the same thing. He said, to know what is good, good for something is to know its purpose, to know its aim, to know its function. Everything in this world has a proper function. A knife is supposed to cut. Water is supposed to quench Thirst, so forth and so on. And we say that something is good when it performs its function well. The good for a knife is not the same as a good for a spoon. But when the knife cuts well, it's a good knife. And when the spoon scoops well, it's a good spoon. And for Aristotle, not only do knives have a proper end or purpose. And spoons and water and everything else. But man has a proper end or purpose as well. And when man performs his function, his purpose, efficiently. Then we say that man is good. Every individual thing has form, and it has matter. And any individual thing will be happy when it performs its function. That is, it actualizes its form when it does that which it was designed by nature to do. Or designed by man, by the artifice of man to do. A good table is one that does what the maker of the table intended it to do well, that leads then to the question, what is man's end or purpose? What is man's function? And Aristotle said, what is unique to man is that he is a rational animal. And so a virtuous life for man is life in accordance with a rational principle. Now, if we try to live in a rational way. Not simply being carried away by our desire or being foolish people. If we live according to a rational principle, Aristotle said, we're going to realize certain character traits which are marked by moderation. Remember that for many, many years Greek culture has promoted the notion of moderation. Peace of mind, inner tranquility, not going to excess. And Aristotle is giving a metaphysical account of this. Man's purpose is to be a rational animal. To operate according to a rational principle. And the most rational way to live is not to be excessive. Not to be lenient or excessive. We need to pursue certain character traits. Which, if you generalize or abstract what's common to them all. They will always be the golden mean. They'll always be virtuous, golden, wonderful, valuable. Because they are the mean between the excess and the deficiency of other character traits. So if we're thinking about facing death. It will be excessive for you to be a coward and to fear it too much. It will also be deficient on your part not to fear it enough to be foolhardy. The golden mean is to be courageous in the face of death. So you don't have cowardice or foolhardiness. You rather have courage. And every virtue for man. Then every virtue for man will have to illustrate man's unique function as a rational animal. And thus will be a mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency. All of the virtues that ordinary Greek citizens would have set forth as good things for man, according to Aristotle, operate as a mean between excess and deficiency. All of the common virtues for man amount to a golden mean. Now we run into a problem immediately when Aristotle explains some of the virtues that are the golden mean, according to him. Aristotle talks about a virtuous man as being a large souled, or what we would translate in English, a magnanimous man. But when he describes this magnanimous man, I've never known an undergraduate or a graduate student for that matter, who grew up in American culture. I've never known known anyone to read his description of the large souled man who didn't come back saying he's talking about an egotist. He's talking about somebody who is proud and puffed up and is a stuffed shirt. Now how is it that Aristotle thought he was describing a good man, a commendable man? He was giving the golden mean. And yet we look at it and we see, say, who wants this guy at your party? You know what a self centered stuffed shirt. What's the nature of my criticism here? What Aristotle calls the golden mean is culturally relative and individually relative, isn't it? What he considers moderate, I might consider deficient or excessive. Aristotle, I don't think ever understood and appreciated the problem of relativity when it comes to judgments as to what is really the middle line. This comes home to me almost all the time when I see presbytery debates. Just to take the life of the church as an illustration of the problem. You have some people who say, well, we shouldn't make an issue out of this. You know, we don't want to be extremist. And other people who are making an issue out of it will point out, well, but if we don't, there's this deficiency here, and yet we don't want to go beyond this and be excessive over there. Every man thinks that he's in the middle of the road, that he's the one who's got the perfect balance. How could Aristotle not have understood that? How do you rationally and objectively resolve these differences as to what the perfect balance is in terms of human conduct and character traits? Aristotle thought that there was a right or wrong that was relative to each individual. And yet he did think you could abstract something common to all of those relative right and wrongs for individuals. And it was that abstraction that he called the mean, the golden mean. Now the problem you see then is that as Aristotle was defending the golden mean as his ethical standard, it sounds good as an abstract idea. But since it comes, you know, it comes down to it's a different golden mean for all these different individuals. Aristotle has no authority. He has no absoluteness to his ethic. Or he has absoluteness at the level of abstraction. We should all follow golden mean.

Absolutely.

What does that mean? Pardon me? What does that come down to? Well, it's all without any standardizing authority, because it's one thing for you and another thing for me. Aristotle had said that man has to live up to his unique character as a rational animal. But what if we have a different view of man than Aristotle did? What if instead of man having as his unique feature that he is rational, whereas the other animals are not, we look at man and say, well, you know, what's different about man is that he's the animal that's always in heat, that is unique. All other animals have periods of sexual activity except man, who is sexually active always. I think it was Reinhold Niebuhr, the liberal theologian, that pointed this out. He said, the answer to Aristotle is no. What makes man unique is not that he's a rational animal, but a sexual animal. So in that case, what men should be doing is not contemplating. You know, Aristotle made contemplative virtues. You know, the life of the mind is the highest form of life. Actually, sex should be the highest form of life, if you follow his approach. That's the problem with an empirical approach to ethics. It becomes relative. There is no absolute standard possible. I'm going to go to nature and find out what's right or wrong for man. Well, people have different ways of reading nature, and they choose different features about man that give his uniqueness. So there are obvious problems with Aristotle's ethic as well as his view of nature or his general view of reality, his metaphysics. Okay, we're going to be running out of time. So let me quickly pass from his ethic of being rational and living the life of contemplation, knowing the moderation of the golden mean, and talk about politics? For Aristotle, no man is sufficient to himself. If he's going to live. Well, man must live in community. And thus Aristotle not only said, man is a rational animal, he is a political animal. And so if we would know the good life, we should also ask what sort of community we should live in. What kind of constitution or organization or laws are going to be the best environment for producing a virtuous man? Man is by nature a political animal, according to Aristotle. And so he can only realize his highest good if he lives in a City state, a polis, a city state. Remember, the sophist had maintained that every man is an autonomous individual who can realize his own good for himself. Man is the measure of all things. Aristotle disagreed with that. He said man must live in community, live in a city state if he would realize his good. Well, then what exactly should be the kind of government that you have in the city state? Now, what have I told you thus far that would give you a hint as to how you would approach this? Well, every good is a mean between extremes, right? And I've also told you that Aristotle didn't believe you know any ideal separate from this world. You only know ideals based on your experience in the natural world. So what Aristotle did is he did an inductive research examination of all the different kinds of government that he knew of in his day and age, and looked for what is the mean between the extremes. He recognized that you can have a relatively true form of a government, a relatively good form of government, as well as a perverted form of that same government. So if you're looking at rule by one individual, the relatively good form of that is a monarch. The perverted form of it is a tyranny. Or we can look at a government by a few rulers, not many, but a few. The relatively good form of that is aristocracy. The perverted form of that is going to be oligarchy. He said you could have many rulers. The relatively good form of that is going to be what he called politics, and I'll define that in a minute. And the perverted form of it is democracy. Aristotle, being raised in an aristocratic family, had no use for democracy. According to him, polity is the best form of government because it is the true or genuine democracy. That is the rule by the many in the interest of the state as a whole. Polity is the rule by the many, and they rule in the interest of the state as a whole. You see how that's not democracy. Every man looking out for what's best for him individually. Rather, the many rule. But they always rule looking for what's best for the state as a whole. And according to Aristotle, this was a fusion of all oligarchy on the one hand and democracy on the other. And so it comes down to something of a mean. It gives a balance between the rule of the many and the rule of a few. It gives balance between the interest of the rich and the poor, so forth and so on. And so it's going to amount to a state where the balance of power is in the hands of the middle Class where Aristotle himself may have preferred a monarchy. For practical purposes, remember, he's not an idealist. You got to live in this world, be realistic. For practical purposes, you need to have the middle class ruling. And that's what he called polity as the most effective form of the state. Aristotle was well aware, given his place in history, of the mismanagement of the state that had arisen during the Peloponnesian War. You have to remember there were no permanent laws in Athens. From day to day, the law would change depending on what the democracy voted on. Today we can hardly imagine. It just seems so absurd that they would do that. But of course, it's through sad experience like that that Aristotle and others turned against democracy. He said we need to have a body of laws that make the rule of the state predictable. And yet are there ever going to be a body of laws that cover every situation perfectly? Aristotle, remember, is an empiricist. He knows that this world isn't nice and tidy like Pythagorean mathematical forms. Plato was too idealistic. So even the best of laws, which we need laws, but even the best of them are going to fall short of covering every detail or unique circumstance. And when those laws must be supplemented, Aristotle thought that the best judgment to trust would be that of the many rather than the few. Few, because they would be looking out for themselves, more likely. Well, I'm going to, for the sake of time, leave our summary off at that point. We've tried to cover Aristotle from his metaphysical concepts through his epistemology to his ethic and his political philosophy. Let me run over a one page summary of the high points in Aristotle for you now. So you have it kind of encapsulated in a nutshell for you. Aristotle took philosophy to be an attempt to explain the natural world. The natural world is the fully real world. He did not like Plato's idea that the natural world was a shadow world. Philosophy's job, as the Milesians and the atomist recognized, was to explain the natural world. And in order to do this successfully, Aristotle said that philosophy should not introduce any appeal to a mysterious, transcendent world of ideas, as his mentor Plato had done. We're going to explain the natural world. We've got to stay in the natural world and not appeal to something mysterious and beyond this world. There were two things in particular that Aristotle retained from Plato's philosophy. He agreed with Plato that reality was found in the form of things, and that's what made it intelligible. Reality is found in the form of things. And he also retained a generally teleological viewpoint that Plato had as well. But Aristotle's key criticism of Plato's theory of the forms is that Plato's way of looking at things is no help in explaining change in motion in the natural world, since that's the most prevalent aspect of our experience. Plato's philosophy was just irrelevant. And so Aristotle advanced beyond Plato's philosophy by introducing conceptions. This is just against the background of our lengthy lecture. This is just summary. First, the conception of eminent form. Form is not outside this world. It's always embedded in particulars. And then the notion of potentiality, that everything that's in this world, it is in a process of moving from its potential to. To its actual form, from its background, its material possibilities, to its actual form and purpose. For Aristotle, only particulars have existence. Individual, sensible things. They're the only things that exist. Where are the forms then? They are embodied in. In those sensible particulars. Every object in the natural world is a compound of form on the one hand, and matter on the other. Matter represents its potentiality, form represents its actuality and purpose. How do we learn about these forms if they're embedded in the particulars? Through a process of mental abstraction. The form of the thing ultimately is its end, its telos or purpose. What makes a natural object a natural object? What's the defining mark of a natural object? It has within itself a principle of motion, an entelechy that makes it develop in a particular direction. The four different aspects of something which must be known if you're going to understand it. You must understand its material cause, its formal cause, its efficient cause, and its final cause. When something comes to fully possess its form, that is to say that it is properly functioning, it is doing what it's aiming to do, it's fulfilling its purpose. For Aristotle, God was pure form, pure actuality. God was thought thinking itself. And because thought thinks itself, it can be an unmoved mover. The world loves perfection as it's found in the unmoved mover. Thought, thinking, it's thought. And that makes the world go round. In ethics, man should seek to realize his proper purpose as a rational animal, and thus pursue virtues which are as an abstraction, always a mean between two extremes. And to live well, man must live in a well ordered city state which will be governed by the middle class, another mean between two extremes. And yet Aristotle did not explain really how universals were embedded in particulars or an individual human mind. And nor could he explain the absolute world and authority of ethics, given his idea of moderation between extremes.