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Metaphysics, Book One. Ari reviews theories of stuff.
Aristotle begins talking about how we love our senses, particularly sight, and how all humans are curious by nature.
He then asks, What is wisdom?
He reviews philosophers before him on the subject, notably the poet Hesiod and the Pythagoreans, teaching dualistic categories of principles.
“The One is substance,” Aristotle seems to be saying.
Other philosophers have posited materialism and other ‘causes’ but they are not the ‘substance’.
He rejects Plato’s Forms as hard to prove, and the Pythagorean number as being in the order of "effect" and not causal. Furthermore, Plato’s understanding of the One describes it as undifferentiated, when in fact the Forms are manifold; Aristotle charitably supposes that there needs must be more definitions of One.
So, to summarise Book One, Aristotle says that past philosophers have concerned themselves with the physical, not the metaphysical, so far in looking for causes of reality.
Book Two is about method. Aristotle says nature, the physical world, is either understandable by math or by reasoning, and so he decides to define nature better to find out which method will work best.
Book Three is about categories. Universals, principles, elements – these are the word bandied about. What categories do things go in? Categories of characteristic, or of their substance? The highest category must be principles, it turns out.
On the other hand, if everything physical is infinitely individualized then how can you be said to know anything? They all have irreducibly different characteristics. A unifying principle presupposes that they share commonalities of SOME kind, but this principle needs must be universal to Aristotle.
Then I stopped reading because I found his presuppositions of objectivity and cause-effect relationship tiresome and disagreeable.
More to come.
Aristotle begins talking about how we love our senses, particularly sight, and how all humans are curious by nature.
He then asks, What is wisdom?
He reviews philosophers before him on the subject, notably the poet Hesiod and the Pythagoreans, teaching dualistic categories of principles.
“The One is substance,” Aristotle seems to be saying.
Other philosophers have posited materialism and other ‘causes’ but they are not the ‘substance’.
He rejects Plato’s Forms as hard to prove, and the Pythagorean number as being in the order of "effect" and not causal. Furthermore, Plato’s understanding of the One describes it as undifferentiated, when in fact the Forms are manifold; Aristotle charitably supposes that there needs must be more definitions of One.
So, to summarise Book One, Aristotle says that past philosophers have concerned themselves with the physical, not the metaphysical, so far in looking for causes of reality.
Book Two is about method. Aristotle says nature, the physical world, is either understandable by math or by reasoning, and so he decides to define nature better to find out which method will work best.
Book Three is about categories. Universals, principles, elements – these are the word bandied about. What categories do things go in? Categories of characteristic, or of their substance? The highest category must be principles, it turns out.
On the other hand, if everything physical is infinitely individualized then how can you be said to know anything? They all have irreducibly different characteristics. A unifying principle presupposes that they share commonalities of SOME kind, but this principle needs must be universal to Aristotle.
Then I stopped reading because I found his presuppositions of objectivity and cause-effect relationship tiresome and disagreeable.
More to come.
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