Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 10 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 10
Aristotle on Philosophy and Virtue
Aristotle’s Life
Unlike Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen. He came from the far north of Greece, from the kingdom of Macedon; but in 367 BC, when he was 17, he was sent by his family to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy. Aristotle stayed at the Academy for two decades, and became one of Plato’s most prominent students and collaborators. Towards the end of that period, however, the expansionist policies of Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father, meant that life in Athens became increasingly uncomfortable for resident Macedonian aliens like Aristotle. Moreover Plato himself died in 347 BC and leadership of the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus. Consequently Aristotle decided to leave Athens, and he went to join a group of Platonist philosophers involved in advising the ruler of the city of Assos, a city on the north Aegean coast of what is now Turkey.
Aristotle then accepted an invitation by Philip II to return to Macedonia to take on the role of tutor to Alexander. Many commentators have been interested in speculating on just what kind of an influence Aristotle exercised on his royal pupil, but Alexander’s subsequent career choice of world conquest and megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement suggests that he was probably a rather difficult student.
After Alexander’s succession to the throne and his departure with his army for his campaigns in Persia and further east, Aristotle returned to Athens in 334 under the protection of that city’s newly appointed Macedonian regent. Upon his arrival in the city Aristotle set up his own philosophical school in a public exercise park called the Lyceum; and the practice of discussing philosophy as they walked around this park led to his students becoming known as ‘Peripatetics’, from the Greek word for ‘to pace to and fro’. This school flourished for the next eleven years, and it is generally supposed that most of Aristotle’s extant writings are lecture notes and teaching materials composed during this period. However Alexander died suddenly in 323 BC at the age of 32, and the Athenians thought that this gave them an opportunity to get rid of their Macedonian overseers. And in the course of this upsurge in anti-Macedonian sentiment, Aristotle found himself facing charges of impiety. This was the same allegation that had led to Socrates’ execution two generations earlier, and Aristotle decided to retreat hastily from Athens to his family estate at Chalcis. According to the ensuing doxographical tradition, Aristotle asserted that he had departed from Athens ‘lest the Athenians commit a second sin against philosophy’. Unfortunately he survived only a year in exile, and he died 322 BC at the age of 62.
Aristotle’s Philosophical Methodology
Aristotle usually begins any major inquiry with a survey of the views of his philosophical and scientific predecessors, or, as he sometimes puts it, the views of the wise. He thinks that any such view is likely to contain some element of truth, and it is one of his aims to locate that truth and build on it. The points where previous thinkers are in conflict with one another are accordingly seen as marking out the intellectual problems that we have to solve. And a proper solution, one that reflects a full understanding of the topic in question, should enable us to see not only who was right and who was wrong on a given issue, but also why the erroneous view seemed plausible to its advocates.
Viewed as contributions to the history of philosophy, these Aristotelian surveys of the views of his predecessors have serious limitations. Aristotle is not seeking to give a full and accurate account of the views of these thinkers for its own intrinsic interest. The emphasis is firmly placed instead on examining these views as a way of locating clues that will enable us to work our way towards credible answers to philosophical questions. Consequently Aristotle often anachronistically formulates the views of previous thinkers in his own technical vocabulary, and he frequently reads back into their views questions and ideas that shape his own thought rather than theirs.
Aristotle also accepts that what ordinary people say must form part of the material from which philosophical inquiries start. In some respects this is once again a matter of conceding that the existing opinions of people are part of the phenomena that a philosopher must seek to explain. However a substantial part of Aristotle’s work is concerned with conceptual clarification, attempting to articulate and analyse ideas that are in a way already familiar. Thus we can draw a distinction between, for example, attempting to determine whether it is true that a particular person acting in a particular situation is responsible for what he or she does and attempting to determine what is meant by ascriptions of personal responsibility. Ordinary people’s opinions on the former issue can undoubtedly be seriously mistaken. In contrast, the rules and linguistic conventions followed by ordinary people are what give the words and expressions employed by philosophers and intellectuals their underlying sense. Of course, this does not rule out the legitimacy of such thinkers introducing their own stipulative definitions of technical terms. If such terms, though, are words that already have a well-established ordinary use, then this process is likely to generate serious confusion and interminable disputes in which the participants are talking at cross-purposes. And it is in any case true that if these stipulative definitions are to be understood by anyone, they will ultimately need to be explained either ostensively or with the assistance of language that does derive its sense from ordinary usage.
Aristotle also accepts that in some areas of inquiry it is necessary to go out and collect a great deal of factual evidence before one can usefully begin constructing theories. Thus he recommends researching as widely as possible before starting to classify, generalize, and theorize, and he followed this advice himself by undertaking or causing to be done, much systematic research, especially in the areas of biology and historical studies.
However two problems arise here. Firstly, if the collection of extensive factual evidence is required before we can get to grips with a problem, is it really a problem that philosophers are equipped to handle? After all, philosophers, unlike scientists, can scarcely claim any special expertise at uncovering factual evidence. They are not trained to conduct field observations or to construct and record the outcomes of experimental situations. Similarly they have no special ability to construct or even use the kind of investigative instruments (telescopes, magnetic resonance scanners, particle accelerators etc.) at the disposal of scientists. Nor do we characteristically find philosophers distributing questionnaires and subjecting the resulting answers to meticulous statistical analysis. Now we can readily concede that Aristotle the man is perfectly entitled to engage in both empirical and philosophical investigations as he sees fit. However it seems plausible to suppose that when he is undertaking empirical investigations, then, in so far as he undertaking them competently, he is operating as a scientist rather than a philosopher. Thus we appear to be precluded from thinking of the collection of factual evidence as a component of a philosophical response to an intellectual problem.
The second problem is that Aristotle seems not to give due consideration to the theory-ladenness of even our most basic observations. Aristotle seems to be mostly operating with a model of perception in which a straightforward causal interaction between the perceiving subject and the object he is perceiving generates a certain perceptual outcome irrespective of the prior beliefs that the subject brings to this encounter. However this model of perception appears to be seriously flawed. One simple illustration of this is provided by drawings of a Necker cube. The same drawing generates an alternating sequence of different visual impressions in an observer even though nothing changes in the drawing itself and the observer continues to occupy the same spatial position. Psychologists explain this phenomenon in terms of the visual impressions changing as the brain alternates between two competing hypotheses about the three-dimensional shape most likely to underlie that two-dimensional array of lines. And once we are on the lookout for this effect, we can find manifestations of it in a wide variety of perceptual situations. So far from our perceptual experience providing us with a stock of theory-neutral evidence that we can turn to in order to assess the merits of competing theories, it seems sensible to conclude that what we experience is itself shaped in many important respects by the theories and beliefs we already happen to hold.
Once he has his survey of the views of his predecessors in place and he has noted the conceptual distinctions made manifest in ordinary usage, then Aristotle’s usual move, in the case of philosophical problems, is to set about providing an overall solution that seeks to maximize the amount of true opinion recoverable from the views of his predecessors, explains the existence of false belief where this must be postulated, offers a productive guide to action or future investigation, and avoids, to as great an extent as possible, paradoxical or seemingly inconsistent conclusions. And as he attempts to construct this solution, he continues to operate dialectically by trying out objections to what he himself has said and by raising new questions.
Moreover it is worth noting that despite his ground-breaking achievements in developing a system of formal logic capable of handling statements incorporating the quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘all’, Aristotle does not attempt to impose deductive patterns of reasoning on all areas of inquiry. He believes that some can aim at a high degree of precision and certainty, whereas others for various reasons cannot. So he would happily accept that it would be as foolish to demand demonstrative proofs from a rhetorician as it would be to accept merely probable reasoning from a mathematician. Aristotle is always pleased when he thinks he has uncovered some knock-down philosophical argument that approaches a mathematical or geometrical proof in its clarity and cogency. But he is also prepared to concede that philosophical argument often has a looser texture. In addition to deductive inferences, it involves appeals to what is likely and reasonable, the drawing of analogies, the utilisation of clues from common patterns of speech, and so on. And in some cases the philosopher can even legitimately employ persuasive devices and techniques that verge on propaganda rather than methods of dispassionately searching after the truth.
 Back to Home Page |
Send E-Mail to: alan.bailey4@yahoo.co.uk
Copyright © 2007 Alan Bailey. All Rights Reserved