ARISTOTLE ('Αριστοτέλης). - The greatest Greek philosopher and one of the greatest of all time.
I. - 1. LIFE. - A. was born in Stagira (today Stavro) in Chalcidice in Thrace, in 384-385 B.C. His father Nicomachus, from a family of physicians, perhaps originally from Messenia, was physician to Amyntas II of Macedonia. His mother was descended from colonists of Chalcis in Euboea, where A. had a plot of land and a house. Having lost his parents as a boy, he was raised by Proxenus of Atarneus, perhaps his relative, to whose son Nicanor he later repaid the benefit received from the father, adopting him and destining his daughter Pythias to be his wife (Test. 12). In 367-366 he came to Athens and entered the Academy, where he remained, until Plato's death, 20 years. The reports of serious disagreements between him and his master are due to the false interpretation of a passage of his disciple Aristoxenus of Tarentum and to the general tendency toward romanticizing in late biography. These were already set right in the 2nd century A.D. by Aristocles of Messina (Euseb., Praep. ec., XV, 2, 3). Of the veneration that A. had for Plato, proof is the so-called elegy of the altar, which he dedicated to Eudemus (it is not known whether the Cyprian or the Rhodian) and which concerns an altar consecrated, as he writes, "to the venerable Friendship of the man (Plato), whom the wicked have not even the right to praise." Things must have gone differently with Speusippus, who succeeded the master in the direction of the Academy, if in the same year (348-7) A. and Xenocrates left Athens and withdrew to Assos, in the Troad. The city was then under the lordship of Hermias, a eunuch who from a money-changer had become prince of Atarneus, but he had entrusted its administration to the academics Erastus and Coriscus of Scepsis, whose counsels and teaching, while Plato was still alive, he had begun to follow. A. immediately won the friendship of Hermias and married his niece and adopted daughter Pythias, from whom precisely was born to him the Pythias whom he was later to destine for Nicanor. At Assos he remained 3 years and had among his listeners Theophrastus of Eresus on the nearby Lesbos, and his nephew Callisthenes. In 345-344, he moved to Mytilene, whence, accepting the invitation of Philip of Macedonia, who chose him as tutor to the thirteen-year-old Alexander, he set out two years later for Pella, in the company of his nephew and perhaps also of Theophrastus. It is not improbable that the choice was suggested by Hermias, who maintained with Philip secret and dangerous political relations, which determined his ruin. Suspected, in fact, by the Persian court, he was in 341 taken by treachery and conducted to Susa, where he was tortured and crucified. On the scaffold he wished it to be announced to his friends that he had committed nothing unworthy of philosophy. A. honored his memory with a cenotaph at Delphi, for which he wrote the epigram, and with the famous hymn to Virtue. Alexander was under the care of A. until 340, the year in which Philip, setting out against Byzantium, entrusted to him the regency of the kingdom. During the three years he had been together with the master and his most faithful companions in the peaceful retreat of Mieza. What A. taught him we do not know, but, besides philosophy, he must have given a large place to poetry and politics. For him he seems to have prepared an edition of the Iliad, and to this period will belong the dialogue On Kingship and the one in 3 books On Poets. In the years that followed, until 335, A. divided his stay between the court and Stagira. At the court he had formed a friendship with Antipater, the future regent, and had his protection until beyond his death. The letters he addressed to him amounted to 9 books, and to him A. entrusted the execution of his last wishes. In 335-334 A. returned to Athens. Pythias had died, and he had taken with him a woman of Stagira, Herpyllis, by whom he had the son Nicomachus. But of the first he preserved a dear memory, and in his will he arranged that "her bones be transported to the place where he would be buried, as was also her desire." The Academy had been for 4 years under the direction of Xenocrates, who succeeded Speusippus, who died in 339. To re-enter it was impossible for A.: he had already gone too far and could have taught only in a school of his own. He opened it in the precinct of Apollo Lyceus, giving it the form, as the Academy already had, of a religious association celebrating the cult of the Muses. Later it also had a fund and more suitable premises outside the Diocares gate. From the use of the covered walks (περίπατοι), where the pupils conversed, Plato's school had already received the name of Peripatos (Epicurus, Fr. 171; Philodemus, Ind. Acad. 6, 5; 7, 9). To that of A. it remained par excellence, also on account of the appellation of Peripatetics, by which its frequenters were designated for the habit of reasoning while walking (cf. Epicurus, Fr. 423). Continuing the academic custom, the pupils bore among themselves the name of "friends" and gathered in common meals and symposia, for which A. himself dictated the rules. The morning hours were dedicated to the more difficult disciplines: in the afternoon A. spoke to a larger audience on rhetoric and dialectic. Besides A., Theophrastus and Eudemus of Rhodes also taught. Although modeled on the Academy, A.'s school was something entirely new and different. Directed principally toward research, it enormously expanded the field of its own activity, putting in the place that mathematics held in that school the biological and historical sciences. The work that A., in collaboration with his pupils, produced in the 13 years he still lived has something prodigious about it, and in many points has defied the centuries. The protection of Antipater and of Alexander assured him the means, and it was only in dependence on the great enterprise in Asia that he was able to know specimens of the fauna and flora of those distant regions. We know almost nothing of the relations between him and the king during this period, to which the Alexander or On Colonization belongs, but he certainly could not approve the policy of equating the Barbarians with the Greeks, increasingly emphasized by Alexander in Asia, and the news in 327 of the killing of Callisthenes, who had followed the expedition as official historian, must have been very bitter to him. A.'s position in Athens was nevertheless dependent on the fortune of his disciple. When when the latter died in 323, the anti-Macedonian party promoted a prosecution for impiety against him. The principal charge, brought by Demophilus, perhaps the son of the historian Ephorus, was based on the hymn to Hermias. A. avoided the trial by fleeing, so as not to give the Athenians, as he put it, the occasion to sin a second time against philosophy. Having withdrawn to Chalcis, to his mother's house, he died there the following year, at the age of 63. He left Theophrastus at the head of the school.
2. WORKS
The books of A.'s works catalogued in the 1st century B.C. by Andronicus of Rhodes amounted to 1,000. We have remains of his πίνακες in two Arabic sources (v. A.s. Op., vol. V, and A. Baumstark, op. cit. in the bibliography, p. 61), from which about 100 titles are derived. We reach 200 by adding a list that has come down to us in the twofold redaction of Diogenes L. and of the Vita Menagiana, which very probably goes back to Hermippus (c. 200 B.C.) and through him to the Library of Alexandria. With the Constitution of Athens, restored to us by 2 papyri, and including the apocryphal works, we possess 47 works for 162 books. The fragments and testimonies amount to a little more than 60. Of these latter, some had a dialogic form and were part of the works composed by A. for publication, which he himself cites under the name of ἐξωτερικοί ο ἐκδεδομένοι λόγοι (H. Bonitz, Index, p. 104 b, 44 ff.), and which the ancients called precisely exoteric. These were contrasted with those intended solely for the use of the School, called acroamatic by the commentators, among which, apart from the Constitution of Athens, fall all those that have come down to us. This explains, in contrast with the «flumen aureum orationis» of which Cicero speaks (Acad., II, 119: other texts in Zeller, p. 111, 1), their often neglected style, almost always dry, at times extremely concentrated, and the network of internal cross-references, not all of them first-hand (Bonitz, Index, p. 95 b ff.). The additions, the multiple redactions, the interruptions and the fluid state of certain parts bear witness to the continuous work of reworking to which, following the progress of reflection and of teaching, they were subjected. Each pupil had, at least as far as concerned him, his own copies, which in this way came to circulate also outside the School, and,
After A.'s death, they must certainly have been an object of trade, in which the Lyceum itself may not have been uninvolved. Of this we have a precious document in a fragment of a letter of Epicurus, which names the Analytics and the works On Nature (v. Epicuri Ethico, ed. C. Diano, Florence 1946, no. 265). A.'s personal manuscripts, left, according to Strabo (XIII, 1, 54) and Plutarch (Sull., 26), as an inheritance to Theophrastus, passed, upon the latter's death, to Neleus of Scepsis, son of Coriscus. His heirs, having hidden them in a cellar so as not to let them fall into the hands of the Attalids of Pergamon, later sold them, damaged by worms and damp, to Apellicon of Teos, an officer of Mithridates. Sulla, having taken Athens (86), seized them and brought them to Rome. Andronicus of Rhodes, the tenth scholarch of the Lyceum, having obtained copies of them from Tyrannion, Cicero's librarian, used them for his great edition, to which our manuscript tradition goes back. The story is true: what is false is, from what the two aforementioned authors add to it, that, apart from those, no other copies existed in the Greek world. The Library of Alexandria had them (v. Zeller, p. 145 ff.), Eudemus had them in his school at Rhodes (cf. Simplicius, Phys., ed. H. Diels, vol. II, Berlin 1895, p. 923, 10), nor could the Lyceum have lacked them, without which Andronicus could not have given the text that we possess. On the other hand, all later philosophy presupposes a direct knowledge of them.
The order of the works that have come down to us goes back in large part to A. It begins with the books of logic. There follow: the works of physics, in which psychology and biology are included, then metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetics.
Logic, called Organon by later writers, comprises 5 works: 1) Categories, among A.'s oldest works in content: chs. 10-15 (Postpraedicamenta) are apocryphal; 2) De interpretatione, later, it seems, than the Prior Analytics, and whose authenticity was doubted by Andronicus; 3) Prior Analytics, I-II, from the 2nd Athenian period; 4) Posterior Analytics, I-II: a large part of Book I goes back to the Academic age; 5) Topics, I-IX: books II-VII go back to the Academic period: book IX, which also bears the title Sophistical Refutations (that is: Refutations of Sophistical Arguments), and where the name of Coriscus occurs, was composed at Assos.
The works relating to nature (τὰ περὶ φύσεως) are:
1) Physics, I-VIII, resulting from the union of two works cited separately by A. under the names On Nature (I-IV) and On Motion (V-VI, VIII): book VII was already considered by Eudemus not to form part of the work, cf. Simpl., Phys., II, 1036): Jaeger refers its elaboration, if not its composition, to the Academic age, while he places book VII in the 2nd Athenian period; 2) De caelo, I-IV; 3) De generatione et corruptione, I-II, both composed in the period of his teaching at Assos; 4) Meteorologica, I-IV; 5) De mundo, apocryphal and later than Posidonius.
There follow, for psychology: 1) De anima, I-III (Jaeger traces the material of book III back to the Academic age, but with little reason), followed by a series of short works comprised under the name Parva naturalia: 2) De sensu et sensibili; 3) De memoria; 4) De somno; 5) De somniis; 6) De divinatione per somnum; 7) De longitudine et brevitate vitae; 8) De vita et morte, whose first part also bears the title De iuventute et senectute; 9) De respiratione; 10) De spiritu, which knows the distinction between veins and arteries and is from the 3rd century.
Biology comprises: 1) the Researches on Animals (περὶ τὰ ζῶα ἱστορίαι), I-IX, of which VII, VIII, 21-30 and IX are to be considered apocryphal: some manuscripts give a book X, which is at least a generation later than A.; 2) De partibus animalium, I-IV; 3) De motu animalium; 4) De incessu animalium; 5) De generatione animalium, I-V.
There follows a group of apocryphal works: De coloribus (Theophrastus?); De audibilibus (Strato?); Physiognomica (perhaps from the 3rd century B.C.); De plantis, I-II (retranslation from Latin into Greek of an Arabic translation of a text perhaps due to Nicolaus of Damascus); De mirabilibus auscultationibus (a collection of extracts from Theophrastus and from Timaeus of Tauromenium); Mechanica (Strato?); Physical Problems (in 38 sections, a late compilation on originally Aristotelian nuclei); De lineis insecabilibus (attributed by Simplicius to Theophrastus); De ventorum situ (perhaps by Theophrastus); De Xenophane, Melisso et Gorgia (late in form, but drawn from works of A.).
The Metaphysics, in 14 books, numbered A, α (α ἐλαττῶν), B-N, has constituted the greatest problem of Aristotelian philology. After the studies of Brandis, Bonitz and Schwegler, the merit of the solution belongs to W. Jaeger. Setting aside books A, α, Δ and K, 9-10, it is made up of parts of different ages that A. provisionally joined together in anticipation of a definitive draft. α (= II), which the ancients already attributed to Pasicles, nephew of Eudemus of Rhodes, is the note of a lecture of the master. Δ, which A. himself cites as a separate work under the title Περὶ τοῦ ποσαχῶς, and which Hesychius catalogues separately, is a philosophical dictionary made for the convenience of the School. K, 9-12 is a collection of extracts from Phys. II, III, V, by the hand of a pupil. K, 1-8 also seems due to a pupil, parallel to B, Γ, E, I, but it is older. A is, in its brief compass, "a whole system of metaphysics in nuce" (Jaeger), whose composition must be placed in the period of Assos. Ch. 8 and in it § 13 are additions later than 330. B Γ E serve as an introduction to the following group Z H Θ, which treats of substance and (Θ) of potentiality and actuality. I treats of the one and the system of oppositions. M, 1-9, 1086 a 21 is a criticism of the doctrine of ideas and of ideal numbers: the rest of M and N constitute an older redaction on the same subject, which in turn takes up A, 4. Chronologically, the oldest nucleus, born from the lectures at Assos and contemporary with the De ideis and the De philosophia, a dialogue in 3 books, which is the first public exposition of the new system, is constituted by A B K 1-8, A M 9, 1086 a 21 - N. The most recent, from the age of the Lyceum, is Z H Θ I M 1-9, 1086 a 21. In between stand Γ and E 1, which with the changes of B develops the sketch of K 1-8. Chs. 2-4 of E serve as a transition to Z and ff.
On ethics we have 4 works: 1) the Nicomachean Ethics, I-X; 2) the Eudemian Ethics, I-VII (but IV, V and VI are identical with E. N., V, VI, VII); 3) the Magna moralia, I-II, which, although going back to lectures of A., are later than his death; 4) the short treatise De virtutibus et vitiis, entirely spurious. The first two take their name from having been edited respectively by Nicomachus, A.'s son, and by Eudemus of Rhodes. The second, which by many critics of the last century was considered spurious and attributed to the latter, has been by Jaeger
(preceded by Kapp and von der Muehl) definitively restored to A. and placed in the period of Assos. It is preceded by the Protrepticus.
The Politics, I-VIII, is, like the Metaphysics, a composite work. Books IV, V and VI form a whole in themselves, which differs from the rest both in method and in conclusions. Composed, according to Jaeger, in the last Athenian period, it was combined by A. himself with books II-III and VII-VIII elaborated at Assos. The composition of book I, the introduction to the work, would fall in the same period. The Economics is spurious, which in our collection comes after the Politics. From two papyri the Constitution of Athens was restored to us in 1891, which served as book I to the Πολιτεῖαι, in which the constitutions of 158 states were examined.
The last works in the collection are: the Rhetoric, I-III (the authenticity of Book III has been demonstrated by Diels), the so-called Rhetoric to Alexander, which is the work of Anaximenes of Lampsacus (c. 340 B.C.), and the Poetics, originally in 2 books, of which only Book I has survived. From Book II, which dealt with comedy and catharsis, we have extracts in the Tractatus Coislinianus.
Of the esoteric works we have fragments of a certain extent only from the Eudemus and the Protrepticus, composed during the Academic period, and from the De philosophia in 3 books written at Assos. The Eudemus and the De philosophia were dialogues of the type known to us through the imitation made of them by Cicero, who declares that he follows "the manner of A." (Ad Att., XIII, 19, 4). The first, which bore the subtitle On the Soul, took its name from the Academic Eudemus of Cyprus, who died fighting for Dion in Sicily in 354: it dealt with the immortality of the soul. The Protrepticus, an epideictic discourse, of the type of those of Isocrates, was addressed to Themison, prince of Cyprus. Through the imitation made of it by Cicero in the Hortensius it exercised a decisive influence on St. Augustine (cf. Conf., III, 4, 7; VIII, 7, 17). The De philosophia, contemporary with Met., XII, contained the first public exposition of A.'s system. Among the lost works should be noted: the dialogue in 3 books On the Poets, the Didascaliae, that is, the collection of the records of the dramatic performances at Athens, the juridical collections relating to Greeks and Barbarians (Δικαιώματα πύλων and Νόμια βαρβαρικά), and the great work mentioned above on the constitutions. One of the most serious losses is that of the Letters, of which we have scanty and doubtful fragments.
An indispensable complement to the Works is the Corpus of the Commentators, which occupies 26 volumes in the edition made by the Berlin Academy.
3. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A.'S THOUGHT. — It is to W. Jaeger that the merit belongs of having, by concluding the labors of his predecessors, fixed for the majority of A.'s works the chronological limits of their composition and, by the reconstruction of the youthful works, of which Bernays had already laid the foundations, traced the picture of the development of his thought through the three periods — Academic, Assos, and Lyceum — into which his life is divided. In the first period A., as he is revealed to us by the fragments of the Eudemus and the Protrepticus, is still entirely under the influence of Plato. The soul, whose immortality he demonstrates with notable rigor of argumentation, is still conceived as a substance separate from the body. Ethics is placed among the exact sciences, and the highest form of existence is identified with the exercise of φρόνησις understood in the Platonic sense. Although he considers numbers and geometrical magnitudes as εἴδη, A. has nevertheless already elaborated the doctrine of the categories and with the theory of demonstration overturned the logic of the Academy. From this he proceeds in the following period — but the matter must already have begun before Plato's death — to the overturning of ontology. In the fragments of the De philosophia, of the Περὶ ἰδεῶν, of the oldest parts of the Metaphysics and the Physics, the new position, which is the historical one, now presents itself as clearly defined. The doctrine of ideas is subjected to a radical critique and shown to be contradictory. The heavens are cleared of the empty ideas of the One and of Being, identified with the Good, and in their place is set an individual entity, God, whose uniqueness A. affirms (Met., XII, 10), and defines as unmoved mover. But he still conceives the heavens, with the late Academy, as animated, and into their matter he introduces a fifth element "without a name," already postulated by Plato (Tim., 55 c: cf. Simplicius, Phys., p. 1165, 35) and known to the Epinomis (981 c), which uses to designate it the name given since Homer to the luminous part of the atmosphere, the ether. Of this he still makes the soul material, which, in correspondence with Ἰδειχέγεια (Cicero, Tusc., I, 10, 22: cf. R. Hirzel, in Rheinisches Museum, 39 (1884), p. 169 ff.; E. Bignone, A. perduto, Über Entelechie u. Endelechie, I, p. 227 ff.). Against Plato he affirms the eternity of the world also a parte ante. In the same period he writes the first Ethics, which has come down to us under the name Eudemian, and the first Politics. The Eudemian presents the doctrine of the virtues already perfectly elaborated, but the general problematic remains still in large part that of the Protrepticus, and the supreme end is placed in the contemplation of God (E. E., VII, 3). The years of the Lyceum are the years of full maturity. The lines of the system remain those of the preceding period, but the inquiry sharpens them, tirelessly reagitates their problems, exacerbates, on certain points, their aporias. Logic finds its definitive form in the Prior Analytics. Metaphysics is enriched by the admirable three books on substance. Psychology is organized on strictly scientific bases, in which metaphysical speculation merges with the observation of the phenomenon. Ethics and politics also descend from the abstract to the concrete. Not for this does A. become a positivist: the end is always a universal, the form toward which everything tends, whose reality is dynamic and not static: the idea has been transformed into the ideal. The greatest monument of the activity of these years is the organization of scientific research. As regards method, ch. 5 of Book I of the De partibus animalium is one of the most beautiful and moving pages that any scientist has ever written.
4. DIVISION OF PHILOSOPHY
In correspondence with the threefold activity of man, A. divides the sciences into poetic, practical, and theoretical (Top., V, 6, 145 a, 15; Met., VI, 1). The theoretical have as their object the necessary and the end in themselves; the poetic and the practical bear on the possible and have their end in another: in production the former, in action the latter; but the end of action is action, of production the work (Met., I, 1; II, 1; E. N., I, 3; VI, 3; 5). Poetic sciences are the arts (τέχνοι) in their manifold variety, but properly philosophical are only those that have as their object spiritual activities, such as poetics and rhetoric. More defined is the scope of the practical sciences, divided into ethics, economics, and politics (E. E., I, 8; E. N., VI, 9). Mathematics, physics, also called second philosophy (Met., VII, 11, 1037 a, 14), and theology or first philosophy form the complex of the theoretical sciences. Logic has a partly propaedeutic character, within the limits in which, as a doctrine of demonstration, A. conceives it, and he calls it precisely Analytics (Rhet., I, 3, 1359 b, 10) or Apodictic (An. Pr., I, 1). Logic is a late term. The later Peripatetics considered it an "instrument": hence the name Organon.
5. LOGIC
The problem of logic arose for A., as a problem of method, within the very bosom of the Academy. It was the problem of the School: the task was to arrive at a deduction of all reality from a single principle, which would be at the same time the "common principle" of all the sciences. Sciences (μαθηματά) par excellence were the mathematical ones, propaedeutic to dialectic, the science of being and of ideas, under which, in the eidetic form given them by Plato, they too came to fall. The "methods" in use were two: diaeresis or division, which proceeded dichotomously by opposites, and "by the successive elimination of the other parts provided the basis for the demonstration of the part in question," and analysis, which consisted in "reducing (ἀνάγειν = ἀνάδοσιν) the object of the research to an agreed principle" (Proclus, In
Encl., 211, 18). From the most ancient parts of the Organon
and of the Physics, A.'s position is clear-cut: there is no
science except of the necessary, and necessity is given by the cause
(An. Post., I, 2; 4, 6); the method of science is analysis
(Phys., II, 7). But analysis is the moment of research;
in the moment of science the order is inverse: it descends
from the principles and from them shows the necessity of the consequence: its ultimate form is demonstration or apodeixis (ἀπόδειξις). The discourse that expresses it is the syllogism, "a discourse in which, certain things having been posited, something
else follows of necessity from them, being different from
them, through those very things posited" (Top., I, 1: cf. An.
Pr., I, 1). Such necessity can, however, be only formal
(An. Post., I, 6): for it to be absolute, the relation that holds between the things posited must be a relation of universality (καθόλου), and this it is only if it is of totality (κατὰ
παντός) and per se (καθ' αὐτό). And since per se is the attribute that is either contained in the essence of the subject or
contains it in its own, and whatever else cannot be attributed in either of these two ways is an accident
(συμβεβηκός) and falls outside demonstration and
science (ibid., 4), the principle of demonstration is
the essence (ibid., 6: cf. Met., VII, 9). The typical syllogism is
given by the example, normally cited (Bonitz, Index,
770 b 20), of the isosceles triangle, which, being a triangle, has the
sum of its angles equal to 2R. But the task of
science is not so much to show that the properties of the
genus belong to the species, which is not demonstration
"universal and per se" (An. Post., I, 5, 74 a 1),
as that these properties belong "as to a primary" to the genus (ibid., 5). "Every demonstrative science
indeed bears on three things": 1st, the genus ("for arithmetic, the unit", "for geometry, the point or the
line"), of which it "considers the per se attributes";
2nd, these attributes ("even and odd", "straight and
broken"); 3rd, the axioms "from which the demonstration
proceeds". Genus and attributes form the "proper principles", the axioms the "common principles" (ibid., 7; 10).
Of the axioms A. gives three examples: the principle of noncontradiction, that of the excluded third, and that by
which equal subtractions from equal quantities give equal
remainders (ibid., 10; 11). At the same time he affirms that, while of the genus "both the definition and the existence
are posited", of the attributes, on the other hand, only "the
definition is posited", but "the existence is demonstrated either starting from the common principles (that is, from the axioms) or from other things demonstrated previously" (ibid.,
10). Now, since these attributes proceed by opposites and
in the examples given by A. are all of mathematical εἴδη,
and considered, on the other hand, that by opposites de-duced on the basis of the two ontological principles of noncontradiction and of the excluded third, which Euclid's Elements
ignore, there proceeded in the Academy the "diaeretic method" of which Proclus speaks, one must with Solmsen
conclude that the axioms have in this first
phase of A.'s logic a genuine function as premises and that the syllogism that starts from them is nothing other
than the demonstration for which division supplied the
basis. An example of it is found in An. Post., I, 4, 73 b 16
(cf. Top., I, 8, 103 b 5; VI, 6, 143 b 14) and, on the basis
of Met., V, 30, it must be inferred that of the same form
was that by which the property of the
triangle was demonstrated. To the diaeretic method this syllogism is
connected, however, only as regards its function, but as
demonstration it too is an analytic operation. And,
since the common principles are such only by analogy and
every science makes use of them in the form that is suited to its own genus (An. Post., I, 10; 11), and necessity derives always from the essence (ibid., 32, 88 b 3), the essence remains
the principle of every demonstration.
Here is the point at which A. responds to the problem of
the Academy and overturns the Platonic position. Every
proposition being an interval (διάστημα) that the
middle term fills by giving form to a new proposition
and to a new interval, the process neither goes on to
infinity nor has its term in a single principle to which all genera
and all demonstrations can be referred. The essence is
finite, therefore the number of middle terms is also finite. Not
only that; it also has an order, which is that of predication. Now, essence and definition there is of every thing,
but, absolutely, only of that which per se and not per accident is a subject. And here is the doctrine of the categories.
In every proposition something is predicated (κατηγορεῖται) of something. Taken
by themselves the terms are distributed into ten forms (σχήματα)
of predication or categories, which are the ten genera under which
being presents itself (τὰ γένη τοῦ ὄντος): substance (οὐσία), quantity, quality, relation, where, when, position (e.g. seated), condition (e.g. shod), doing and
suffering (An. Post., I, 22; Cat., 4, sqq.). Substance is
being in the primary and absolute sense, distinguished into primary
and secondary substance. Primary substance is being individually determined (τόδε τι), the subject of every inherence
and predication. Secondary substance is the species from which the
first has its form, and, above it, the genus.
The other categories form the accidents or the affections
of substance, and exist only for it (Cat., 4-5).
As supreme genera at which analysis stops (Met.,
V, 28), no category can be resolved into another:
the only common element is the analogy of oppositions:
the center of all is substance, which, having no
contrary, receives all of them into itself (Cat., 5; 10-11; Met.,
IV, 2; X, 4). Consequences: every science has a genus of its own and principles of its own: definitions, which,
having no middle term, are no longer demonstrable. Demonstrations not proper to each genus, and every passage from one genus to another (μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο
γένος) is excluded. In common among them there are only
the axioms, in which the system of oppositions is expressed,
but it is a community of analogy. Being and the one to
which Plato wished to reduce all the others as to a supreme genus,
are not genera; they have as many senses
as there are categories: the term to which all converge, the individual reality of substance (An. Post.,
I, 3; 7; 9; 22-23; 32). And it is from reality that the principles
are drawn, by a process inverse to demonstration, induction (ἐπαγωγή). Sense supplies to the intellect the matter of the universal, but this was already
in it in potency and is brought to act by a second intellect which is the active intellect (ibid., I, 19;
cf. 18; 23; v. below).
The universal is, in this way, of immediate apprehension, but the definition in which the essence is unfolded must
be constructed (ibid., II, 7, 92 b 2). The method of the Academy was division, and in reality there is no other
(ibid., II, 13). It presupposes, however, induction (ibid.;
Top., I, 14, 105 b 27), which can no longer be reduced to
an immediate intuition, is a process, a research
that is like a hunt (An. Post., II, 13) and must be integrated by the syllogism. For at every step there is a
problem, a question in which is proposed (πρότασις) a
choice between two contraries (ibid., 5; An. Pr., I, 31) — the dialogue that gives its name to dialectic (An. Post., I, 2;
10; Top., I, 4; 10) — and a choice involves a reason. Since this, however, cannot be other than formal,
one of the relations of the oppositions among which division
proceeds, the syllogism has at its disposal that only the empty generality of common principles: it is precisely a "logical" or dialectical syllogism, not an apodictic one (An. Post., II, 8, 93 a 15): since apodictic demonstration presupposes the essence, the definition is not demonstrated (ibid., 3-9). And since matter lacks that unity which only the essence can give, the forms of argumentation are many (ibid., I, 22). Hence the "method" given by the Topics, where these forms are catalogued and studied. They are the "elements" of dialectic and, with a term taken from sophistic mnemotechnics, are called "places (τόποι)", eae quasi sedes e quibus argumenta promuntur (Cicero, Top., 8). Division, logical syllogism and inductive discourse are the "organs" of dialectic, which, being on this side of the essence, has no other ground than the probable (τὸ ἔνδοξον), and moving among contraries, while it tends toward the one, always does so with fear of the other (St. Thomas, In An. Post., I, 1). Remove this fear and you will have sophistry (Rhet., I, 1; Soph. E., 11). The overturning of the Platonic position is complete: dialectic is not only not the queen of the sciences, but is not even a science, it is an art of discussion pro and contra (Top., I, 1; 2), and, while being indispensable as a path to principles, it can be employed for any end. Will the sciences then remain isolated in the irreducibility of their principles? In the terms in which the problem was posed by the Academy, yes, but, just as all the categories have their center in substance, it is the science of substance that must serve as principle for all the others: the place of dialectic is taken by first philosophy.
Such, in broad outline, is the picture of A.'s first Logic. Research in the field of natural and human reality, broadening his scientific horizon, forced him in the last period to pose the problem of demonstration in a new form. Hence the Prior Analytics, which, unifying the methods of apodictic and of dialectic, transform what had been a methodology into a true and proper formal logic. To understand this transformation, one must go back to the doctrine of the necessary and the accidental. In apodictic, the necessary is defined as "that which does not admit (μὴ ἐνδεχόμενον) of being otherwise" and is traced back to the universal, understood as a relation of totality and of essence or per se. Consequently the accident is the ἐνδεχόμενον, "that which admits of being otherwise" and does not fall within the essence. In the Prior Analytics (I, 13), the ἐνδεχόμενον is specified into two classes of events: those that happen "for the most part (ὡς ἐπὶ πολύ)" and those "due to chance (ἀπὸ τύχης)". Parallel to this historical and quantitative conception of necessity and contingency is that of the universal reduced to the mere κατὰ παντός, and of which the Analytics demands the express specification in a "all" or "none". Hence, by contrast, the "some". Once the concept is reduced to a mere designation of class, the principle of the syllogism could only be a relation of inclusion. The κατὰ παντός ἢ μηδενός (whence the "dictum de omni et nullo") is defined as ἐν ὅλῳ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι (An. Pr., I, 1, 24 b 26). This permitted: first, the complete formal unification of the logical and of the apodictic syllogism; second, the determination and classification of the figures and moods, with the relative conversions.
Taken in isolation, the theory of the Prior Analytics, if from the point of view of form it represents a perfection, and one may say a definitive one, may nevertheless, in relation to science, appear inadequate and mechanical. But if it is considered within the whole of the Organon and against the background of the Metaphysics, and one takes into account that the "all" is understood by A. only as an index external to the necessity of the essence, one must conclude that the formalism of the Prior Analytics has only a functional value. For A. the principle of every demonstration always remains the essence, and it is for this reason that only the 1st of the 3 figures is perfect and the others must be reduced to it. As for the inductive syllogism of the Prior Analytics (II, 23), which, starting from what in apodictic proof is the conclusion, ascends through the minor to the major, the complete enumeration that it requires for the reciprocation of the minor term and the middle term is possible only because it concerns species and not individuals, and these presuppose a system of the universe, which should permit their deduction.
6. METAPHYSICS
The object of metaphysics or, as A. calls it, first philosophy is "being as being" (Met., IV, 1; cf. I, 2; VI, 1), and, as being absolutely real is God, it is also the science of God or theology (ibid., VI, 1). Of being one speaks in several senses, according to the different categories, but being in the primary sense is substance, of which all the others constitute the affections (πᾶθη) or accidents, and being par excellence is the individual, the only one that exists separately and for itself, the "this something" (τόδε τι). Let us ask what this or that other individual presented to us by sense is in itself, and, once the properly so-called accidents are removed, we have, on the one hand, the complex of determinations by which it is for itself what it is, the essence, and that is itself the substance in what it is as an object of thought, which A. calls precisely "the what it is" (τό τι ἔστιν) and, with a formula that, joining past and present, brings out its permanence and identity, "the being what it was" (τό τι ἦν εἶναι); on the other hand, the substratum (ὑποκείμενον) which has its form in that and constitutes its matter (ὕλη). To say matter and form is to say becoming. For what becomes, becomes something (τό τι), and it is the form, from something (τό ἔξ οὔ), and it is the matter (ibid., VII, 7). Fixed terms of every becoming, for the four categories of being, of quantity, of quality and of place, under which it is understood (Phys., III, 1), are the contraries. But since it is not they that become, but the substratum that has the capacity to receive them (τό δεκτικὸν) and that persists, and this substratum is matter in respect of the contrary of which it is deprived and in whose possession (ἔξις) there will be that determinate reality whose definition is the form, the principles of becoming are: matter, privation and form, but the first two make numerically one (ibid., I, 7; Met., XII, 1-2). Since privation and possession are understood only in relation to one and the same subject (ibid., X, 4), it follows that becoming is not from absolute non-being, but from being in potency (δυνάμει) to being in act (ἐνεργεία), from what can become what it is not yet to what is such in fact (κατὰ τὸ ἔργον, i.e. Met., IX, 8, 1050 a 21), and that as the last term (τέλος) of motion, of that being is the complete realization or entelechy (ἐντελέχεια from τὸ ἐντελὲς ἔχειν, ibid., XII, 5; IX, 6-8; Phys., I, 8).
Matter, which is definable only by analogy (Phys., II, 2, 194 b 9; I, 7), is not [such] as privation, it is [such] as substratum (ibid., XII, 2): it is always a "this", in respect of which the form is a "such" (ibid., VII, 8), and that is, outside that relation, a "this something". Let us put to it the same question of the "what is it?", and we have another substratum and another form. But the process does not go on to infinity: the last real substratum is the elements. Beyond them is being without any further determinations, pure potency of the contraries by which those are understood, "prime matter", the common substratum of everything, but which as such has no knowable form of existence (Phys., III, 5). Let us repeat the same questions for the form, and it resolves itself into a genus, which, as possibility of the differences, acts as matter, and a difference which acts as form (Met., V, 28). Let us ascend from genus to genus, and we arrive at being which, in the irreducible multiplicity of the categories, is no longer the form of anything and is the intelligible matter of all forms. Substance, then, is matter, substance is the form or species, and in it the genus, but substance in the absolute sense is the whole constituted by matter and form or synolon (σύνολον, ibid., VII, 3): the universe is constituted of individuals (Phys., I, 3, 186 b 35).
Matter is potency, it can receive the form and it can fail to receive it: for the passage from potency to act to be accomplished, the action of a cause in act is necessary (Met., IX, 8), and, since the passage is motion, the cause must be a motive cause. The last term (τέλος) of motion and the end in view of which (τό οὔ ἔνεκα) it is accomplished, is the actuality of the form. But the end is a post and the motion an ante, the form must therefore be present in the motive cause. This is what experience shows us: every substance is born from a synonymous substance: man generates man, and the house, present as an idea in the architect, the house (ibid., VII, 7). There are therefore 4 causes: material, motive or efficient, formal and final (cf. Zeller, p. 327 ff.). The formal and the final make one; the motive now goes with the form, in events according to nature and art, now with the matter, in those attributed to fortune and chance, or accidental (Phys., II, 6-9). The causes of the latter are themselves accidental (Met., VI, 2; Phys., II, 8). Hence two kinds of necessity: the one formal and absolute, which goes from the antecedent to the consequent and governs demonstration (Gen. et Corr., II, 11), the other material and hypothetical (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως), which, ascending from the consequent to the antecedent, is such only once the event is accomplished, and admits both being and non-being (ibid.; cf. Met., VI, 3).
Every individual, as regards the form, is identical to all the others of the same species. What differentiates it from them? Matter (ibid., V, 6, 1016 b 32; XII, 8, 1074 a 33), not however as the abstract condition of the form, which is also a universal (ibid., VII, 10, 1035 b 27), but insofar as it is this or that matter (ibid., 8, 1034 a 5) localized in space and time (An. Post., I, 31). This individuality, however, is not the concrete individuality of the synolon, in which essence and existence make one, and which has its reality only from the form (ibid., VIII, 2, 1043 a 2), but the abstract individuality of existence. From this aspect, the individual can only be contingent: full individuality belongs to the eternal substances, to the intellect and to God.
Contingent in individuals, the substances subject to generation and corruption are necessary in the species, which are eternal (Gen. et corr., II, 11). For the form is eternal, eternal the matter, and eternal the movement (Met., VII, 8; Phys., I, 9). Movement could not have a beginning or cessation except through the action of another movement, and, if time cannot be dissociated from it, and since in the instant, which "embraces beginning and end," it is eternal, movement too must be eternal (ibid., VIII, 1; Met., XII, 6). This presupposes the eternity of the cause, and this cause must be one and immobile: one, because movement, in order to be eternal, must be continuous, and it is not such unless it is one (Phys., VIII, 6). As for immobility, since the series of causes cannot go on to infinity, and must lead back to a first mover, this is either immobile or moves itself. Now that which moves itself involves a moved thing and a mover, which, in order to be first, must be immobile; but immobile in itself, it is mobile by accident in relation to the whole of which it is a part: the absolutely first mover must therefore be separate from everything moved and absolutely immobile (ibid., 5-6; Met. XII, 6-7). This first immobile mover, "on which the heaven and nature depend," is God. Essence by excellence first (τό τι ἦν εἶναι τὸ πρῶτον), absolutely simple, He is pure form, pure act, necessary with a necessity that admits no otherwise, and in His necessity perfect (ibid., 7; V, 5). Outside of time, which He in His eternity (αἰών) comprehends (ibid.; De caelo, I, 9), He is also unextended and outside of space (Met., XII, 7: but in Phys., VIII, 10, He is placed at the periphery of the universe). As pure form and in act, He is not only intelligible but also intelligent: intellect (Νοῦς) always in act: thought. As such He has life, and, since every activity is pleasure, He is supremely blessed (Met., XII, 7; 9; E. N., X, 7; 9). His object is Himself, so that "His thought is thought of thought (νόησις νόησεως)," which, exclu-
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