Aristotle’s Metaphysics consists of fourteen books, each of which is divided into several chapters. I recently read the first of the fourteen books, in an edition translated and annotated by A. E. Taylor (Alfred Edward Taylor). This first book surveys early Greek philosophers — for example, it says that Thales believed the universe was essentially water, Anaximenes that it was essentially air, and Heraclitus that it was essentially fire. Taylor calls this first book, “Aristotle’s critical sketch of the history of Greek speculative thought down to his own time.... the earliest known systematic attempt at writing the History of Philosophy.”1
In general, Aristotle had a historical bent; Taylor writes, “the first systematic histories, alike of ideas and of social institutions, are all the work of Aristotle and his immediate pupils.” Aristotle described the political systems of various states, and the history of Physics; he described the history of Psychology in the first book of a work called De Anima (On the Soul). One of Aristotle’s disciples, Eudemus, wrote a history of Math.
Why this interest in history? Aristotle’s background, Taylor says, was in medicine and biology, hence he was accustomed to study growth and development. “He came of a family in which the medical profession was hereditary.” So he wasn’t preoccupied with the eternal and unchanging, as he might have been if his background was in math and geometry.
Taylor writes, “Aristotle’s unsympathetic account of Pythagoreanism and Platonism is largely explained by the simple consideration that the leading ideas of both those philosophies are essentially mathematical, whereas Aristotle was by training and natural bent a biologist, and of a thoroughly non-mathematical cast of mind.” According to legend, over the entrance to Plato’s Academy was inscribed “Let no one enter here who’s ignorant of Geometry.” Plato and his school were interested in unchanging Ideas/Forms/Templates, while Aristotle and his school were interested in history and “positive science.” Over the entrance to his Lyceum, Aristotle should have written, “Let no one enter here who’s fond of Math.”
Aristotle’s writing is, in general, dry and obscure. Like his other books, his Metaphysics wasn’t meant for publication, it consists of lecture notes. Taylor writes,
| The actual ‘literary works’ of Aristotle were the dialogues, intended not for study in a philosophical seminary, but for general circulation among the reading public of Athens. These dialogues... were widely celebrated in antiquity for their literary grace, a quality by no means conspicuous in the Aristotelian writings now extant.... They have perished. |
Aristotle makes painful reading, but if you read just the first book of the Metaphysics, the pain is reduced to manageable proportions. I don’t regret reading Aristotle, and I don’t regret choosing Taylor’s volume. Taylor’s volume is about half Aristotle, and half footnotes/commentary. I downloaded the pdf version from Hathi Trust, then read it in Adobe Acrobat.
Aristotle’s respect for history reminds one of Hegel. Aristotle and Hegel both believed that every widespread belief is partly true; as Taylor puts it, Aristotle believed that “a widely-held conviction must have something in it.”
Both Aristotle and Hegel believed that the final chapter in the history of thought, the conclusion that sums up all previous thought, was their own philosophy. As Taylor puts it, Aristotle “was convinced that his own philosophy was the ‘absolute’ philosophy, the final formulation of that answer to the problems of the human intellect which all previous thought had been vainly trying to express.”
Aristotle is especially proud of his theory of causes. When Aristotle reviews earlier philosophers, he concludes that they all emphasize certain types of cause, but only his own philosophy sums up all possible types of cause, all four types of cause. For example, when Thales said that the universe is essentially water, he was discussing matter, i.e., Material Cause. Likewise, when the Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus) said that the world is made up of solid atoms and the void, they were talking about Material Cause.
When Empedocles said that Love and Strife move the world, he was talking about Efficient Causes. When the Pythagoreans focused on the law or formula of which things are made, they were talking about Formal Cause; likewise, when Plato said that things are the reflection of eternal Ideas, he was discussing Formal Cause.
The fourth and last kind of cause, according to Aristotle, is Final Cause, the end or purpose for which things exist. “What is the explanation of the presence of Order, Beauty, Goodness, and their opposites in the universe — i.e., what is the final cause of existence? The first explicit recognition of such a final cause is contained in the declaration of Anaxagoras that Mind is the source of all cosmic order.”2 Anaxagoras’ Mind or Nous would be an Efficient Cause, and the Order and Beauty in the universe would be the Final Cause. When people take walks, Aristotle says, they do so to be healthy, the Final Cause of their walk is Health.3
Sometimes these four kinds of cause overlap, it’s difficult to sharply distinguish them, especially when you’re talking about the world in general. Perhaps the clearest example of Aristotle’s four causes is a manufactured item, such as a table. The Material Cause would be the wood it’s made of, the Efficient Cause would be the carpenter who makes it, the Formal Cause would be the blueprint or design of the table, and the Final Cause would be the dinner at which the table is used.
Perhaps the idea of Final Cause is the most important and innovative aspect of Aristotle’s theory of causes. The rational-scientific worldview is skeptical, even contemptuous, of the idea of Final Cause. I think it’s an important idea, and in a recent issue, I wrote,
| Both Koestler and Bergson see some sense in teleology, also known as finalism. We’re pulled by the future, as well as pushed by the past. “Causality and finality are complementary principles in the sciences of life [Koestler wrote]; if you take out finality and purpose you have taken the life out of biology as well as psychology.” |
The scientific establishment dismisses Final Cause, and emphasizes chance, especially with respect to evolution. According to the establishment, evolution is driven by genetic mutation, a random process, an Efficient Cause. I think chance plays a minor role; chance can’t create highly-complex structures like the eye and the brain. I was pleased to see that Aristotle also dismisses chance.
Where do order and beauty come from? It would not be reasonable, Aristotle says, “to ascribe so important a result to accident and chance.”4 The cause of order and beauty, Aristotle says, may be what Anaxagoras called Mind, “a principle in things.” Aristotle, like Socrates before him, was impressed by this notion of Mind. I’m also impressed by this notion, if we view Mind as “in things,” as “smart matter,” rather than external to things, rather than the mind of a divine creator.
In my view, evolution is driven by intuition/will/destiny. Aristotle would agree with me that will plays a role, agency plays a role; the organism acts, it’s not merely acted on by environment and mutation. As Taylor says, “Individual agency is an indispensable element in [Aristotle’s] notion of causation.”5 Evolution is a creative process. As I wrote in an earlier issue, “Nature has a creativity that reminds us of an artist or an athlete, an unconscious creativity.”
So Aristotle agrees with me on three points:
- Final cause should be taken into account; we’re pulled by the future, as well as pushed by the past
- Chance plays little or no role in the development of beauty and order, in the process of evolution
- Evolution is driven partly by will/urge/agency
Why do I find Aristotle’s writings dry if we agree on so much? Every philosopher tackles different problems. A philosopher from long ago, such as Aristotle, often tackles problems that no longer exist, that we don’t see as problems. Aristotle devotes much space to analyzing Plato’s theory of Ideas, and refuting Plato’s theory, but I have little interest in Plato’s Ideas. Plato’s theory of Ideas was once an important theory, a cutting-edge theory, but it no longer is. Modern philosophers like Bergson, Coleridge, and Nietzsche are more interesting, in my view, than Aristotle.
Some readers probably think that I should stick with tables, I shouldn’t apply Aristotle’s causes to evolution. Taylor says that tables and statues (and other manufactured items) are “the most obvious illustrations” of Aristotle’s theory. “It seems clear, however, that the analysis was originally suggested rather by Aristotle’s interest as a biologist in the facts of organic development.... what was requisite in order that there should now be an oak on this particular spot.”6 Aristotle is a deep thinker, he’s trying to find the causes of visible things, the causes of beauty/order/arrangement; he’s trying to discover how the world works.
How a plant grows is closely related to how species evolve, and how life originated, and how historical events happen. In all these areas, there seems to be will/agency, and there seems to be goal, destiny, telos. The scientific Establishment under-emphasizes will and destiny, and over-emphasizes chance and chemistry.
When Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory of Ideas, he sometimes uses an apologetic tone, since Plato was his teacher and friend. Aristotle prefaces his criticism by saying,
| Such an investigation is distasteful to me, owing to my personal friendship for the inventors of the doctrine of Ideas. Still, it will surely be allowed that it is commendable and even obligatory in defence of truth to abandon even one’s own cherished convictions, especially in a philosopher. For though both are dear to us, it is a sacred duty to give the preference to truth.7 |
This is probably the source of the adage, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (Plato is a friend, but truth is a greater friend). This adage was later turned against Aristotle himself; around 1550, Petrus Ramus and his disciples rebelled against Aristotelian logic, and often said, “Let Plato be your friend, and Aristotle, but let Truth be a closer friend.” Ramus was popular at Harvard in its early years, hence Harvard took Veritas as its motto. According to Perry Miller, Veritas was “the one word which Ramists used most insistently and most confidently.”
Taylor says that numerous passages in Aristotle can be traced to Plato’s writings. When Aristotle says, ‘Plato is a friend but truth is a greater friend,’ Aristotle “adroitly excuses his attack by the same apology which Plato had employed for his attack on Homer.” Plato had written, “I must speak... and yet I am restrained by the love and admiration I have felt for Homer ever since my childhood. But, after all, a man should not be honored at the expense of truth; so... I must speak.”8
According to Aristotle, Plato’s school said that one class of entities were the visible things around us — dogs, for example. Another class of entities were the ideas behind these visible things — for example, the idea of the dog. Yet a third class of entities were the ideas of math and geometry — for example, the idea of the square, or the idea of the number 7. So Plato’s school multiplied entities, and multiplied ideas, but all this baggage didn’t help to explain how the world worked (according to Aristotle), didn’t explain efficient causes and final causes. Plato’s school was preoccupied with formal causes to the neglect of other kinds of causation.
Aristotle preferred to say that forms/ideas don’t exist in a separate realm, they aren’t a separate class of entities; rather they exist in things themselves; things are a combination of matter and form.9 In Aristotle’s view,
| the Ideal Theory [i.e., Plato’s theory of Ideas] is the substitution of mere Mathematics for Philosophy, and merely duplicates the problems of the sensible world. It throws light neither on efficient nor on final causation. Even the conception of matter in this philosophy is mathematical rather than physical, and, as to motion, its very existence is inconsistent with the principles of the theory.10 |
Aristotle’s criticisms of mathematical philosophy remind me of my own criticisms of today’s analytic philosophy. Perhaps philosophy has always tended to get lost in abstractions.
Where did Plato get his Ideas? Partly from the Pythagoreans, who said that the visible world rested on a world of number and harmony. Plato was also influenced by Socrates, who tried to define virtues such as courage. Socrates wasn’t content to talk about the courage of a soldier or a lion, he tried to define courage in general, the idea of courage. Thus, Socrates’ concern with definitions led to Plato’s concern with Ideas, since Socrates tried to define the idea of Justice, the idea of Courage, as opposed to discussing particular examples of those virtues.11
Were the Pythagoreans wrong to think that the universe is based on numbers? If water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, if human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, if e = mc2, maybe the Pythagoreans were right, maybe the universe is made of numbers.12
On the other hand, some of the numbers in the universe are irrational, as the Greeks realized. Pi, for example, is an irrational number, and the diagonal of a square (as Aristotle often says) is irrational. Irrational numbers must have made the Greeks wonder if the universe really was based on numbers. Sometimes the Greeks tried to force reality into “clean numbers”; for example, when the Pythagoreans counted nine revolving bodies in the sky, they invented Antichthon so there would be ten bodies, believing that ten was a perfect number.13 They tried to force celestial objects into a perfect number.
Coleridge and other Western philosophers believed that the universe was essentially polarity, that the fundamental forces were polar opposites. I noted the similarity between this view and the Chinese theory of yin-yang.
One finds a similar trend in Greek thought. As Aristotle put it, “The opposites are the principles of things.”14 Heraclitus dealt with polarity; he said that things reach an extreme, then turn into their opposite; he spoke of enantiodromia, running toward the opposite. Empedocles emphasized polarity; he said that Love and Strife moved the world. The Pythagoreans believed that ten pairs of opposites were the foundation of the universe:
| 1. Limit | the Unlimited |
| 2. Odd | Even |
| 3. Unity | Multitude |
| 4. Right | Left |
| 5. Male | Female |
| 6. Rest | Motion |
| 7. Straight | Curved |
| 8. Light | Darkness |
| 9. Good | Evil |
| 10. Square | Oblong |
Similar lists of opposites were doubtless made by Chinese who subscribed to the yin-yang theory. I myself am a believer in polarity; the life- and death-instincts are polar opposites, and are important in my philosophy.
Aristotle asks, What is Metaphysics? He says, “If there is anything which is eternal and immutable and has an independent and separable existence, manifestly the cognition of it belongs to speculative science.”15 According to Aristotle, metaphysics is a speculative science that deals primarily with God, since God is both eternal and independent. I would argue that nothing is eternal — not stars, not gods, not morals — and therefore I don’t have much use for metaphysics as Aristotle defines it. I wouldn’t draw a sharp distinction between speculative and practical science because I think speculation often impacts practice/action.
Aristotle also defined metaphysics as the science of the “causes and principles of all being.”16 I find this definition more congenial. My ideas — life- and death-instincts, historical cycles, “everything is connected” — could be said to deal with the causes and principles of all being.
Aristotle says that metaphysics arose only after man’s practical needs had been met, only after civilization had reached a rather advanced level. Metaphysics has no “utilitarian applications,” it exists for its own sake. A slave can be seen as a tool who exists for someone else; “we call a man free who exists for his own ends.” The word “liberal” comes from the Latin liber, free. Aristotle calls metaphysics a “liberal science” insofar as, like a free man, it exists for its own sake, it’s not a tool of a practical goal, it’s not vocational training. Perhaps Aristotle’s notion of “liberal sciences” is the origin of our term “liberal arts.”
In the last issue, I quoted Nietzsche: “Art is the great stimulus to life; how can it be regarded as purposeless, as pointless, as l’art pour l’art?” If Nietzsche was critical of “art for art’s sake,” would he also be critical of Aristotle’s notion of philosophy for philosophy’s sake? Perhaps both art and philosophy serve a purpose, perhaps they both inspire us, guide us, help us to live.
I’ve often thought that learning is never-ending; the more you learn, the more you want to learn; every topic you study leads you to another topic. Aristotle makes a similar point; he says, “All learning is effected through previous acquaintance with some or all of the matters concerned.”17 So Aristotle says that learning enables further learning, while I say that learning stimulates further learning.
Plato’s school took a different view, they felt that much knowledge is innate, and learning is remembering what is already in us, already in the depths of our minds. I’ve argued that our memory is made up, not only of our personal experiences, but also of the experiences of our ancestors. An archetype develops within us over the course of hundreds of generations. So I agree with Plato that much knowledge is innate.
Aristotle is wary of the Platonic notion of knowledge-as-remembering: “If it be suggested,” Aristotle writes, “that this knowledge is really innate, it is surely a mystery how we can possess the most excellent of sciences and yet be unconscious of the fact.”18 Mysterious indeed! I often emphasize the role of mystery in the unconscious, and in the world in general. Plato deserves credit for his view that some knowledge is innate, but Aristotle also deserves credit for his view that learning is often based on previous learning.
Plato felt that we had lived before, he was receptive to reincarnation. Knowledge is innate, according to Plato, because we acquired it in our previous lives. I would argue that, if our memory contains ancestral experiences, and if these experiences are specific/detailed, then we do have a kind of past life, we are reincarnated. So Plato reasons from reincarnation, while I reason to reincarnation. Plato says that, because we lived before, we’re born with knowledge. I’m saying that we’re born with certain knowledge, certain ancestral experiences, certain archetypes; inherited knowledge is a kind of reincarnation, especially if it’s specific/detailed.
In an earlier issue, I discussed
| an Englishman, Arthur Flowerdew, who had visions of the ancient city of Petra, and seemed to know Petra intimately. Finally the BBC interviewed him, and the Jordanian government brought him to Petra. “Once in the city he went straight to the guard room, without a glance at the map, and demonstrated how its peculiar check-in system for guards was used. Finally he went to the spot where he said he had been killed by an enemy spear in the first century BC.”19 |
If this anecdote is genuine, does it suggest reincarnation? Or does it suggest a memory of ancestral experience? Is there any difference between reincarnation and memories of ancestral experiences?
So Plato thinks that some knowledge is innate. Other philosophers, such as Locke, say that the mind begins as an empty bucket, a clean slate (tabula rasa), and we acquire knowledge by sense-perceptions, which we store in our memory. Aristotle tries to find a middle ground between Plato’s theory and Pure Empiricism (Locke’s theory).20
Aristotle turns to the Mind (Nous) of Anaxagoras. Taylor translates Nous as “Rational Intuition,” I would prefer to call it Intuition. At any rate, Aristotle assigns an important role to Nous. He says that it grasps, immediately, those fundamental truths with which reasoning begins and ends. Nous is “always truthful,” “more exact than science,” has a “higher truth than Science,” and is “the principle from which Science starts.”21
Nous resembles sense-perception insofar as it is immediate. “It is Rational Intuition [i.e., Nous] which apprehends the ultimates in both directions. For both the first and the last terms of our reasoning are apprehended by Rational Intuition, not by discursive reasoning.”22
I think Aristotle deserves credit for grasping, however dimly, the power of intuition, and the limitations of “discursive reasoning.” Aristotle’s views on this subject probably had considerable impact. What Aristotle calls Nous resembles what Coleridge calls Reason; Coleridge’s Reason perceived deep truths immediately, it was akin to sense-perception. Perhaps Coleridge wasn’t directly influenced by Aristotle; perhaps Aristotle’s ideas took root in Western philosophy, were passed down through generations of philosophers, and Coleridge found them in a philosopher who lived long after Aristotle.
Aristotle says that philosophy began by emphasizing material factors — water, air, fire, etc. Later the Pythagoreans proposed non-material factors, such as number and harmony, but they used these non-material factors to explain the physical world, the visible world. “All their discussions and investigations,” Aristotle writes, “are concerned with physical Nature. [But] the causes and principles they assign are adequate for the ascent to the higher classes of entities, and, indeed, more appropriate to these than to the science of Physics.”23
So Aristotle thinks that philosophy should deal with more than the physical world, it should deal with the non-visible, the incorporeal, higher things. In a footnote, Taylor says, “‘higher’ — i. e., requiring a greater degree of generalising abstraction for their comprehension; in Aristotle’s favorite phrase, ‘farther removed from sense.’”24 Again, I’m reminded of Coleridge, who often said that Reason/Nous perceives truths that are removed from sense, removed from the visible. Nous perceives these truths immediately, as we see visible things immediately, but it doesn’t deal with the visible; Nous perceives invisible truths immediately.
The ability to see deep truths may not be given to everyone. Taylor writes, “The axiom [is] neither proved nor provable. When the requisite illustrations have been produced, you simply have directly to see what the implied principle is, and, if you do not see it, no proof can make you see.”25 Consider, for example, the Copernican theory. For more than a century, it could not be proven in such a way as to convince everyone. Some people saw the Copernican truth, some didn’t. Some people can see one deep truth, but not another.
Taylor’s volume is a good introduction to ancient philosophy, it combines the virtues of a primary source with the virtues of a secondary source. Taylor’s volume shows that, while Aristotle is a difficult writer who often deals with obsolete topics, he’s also a deep thinker whose ideas still have relevance today. If you want to carry your Aristotle studies further, consider Werner Jaeger’s Aristotle: The History of His Development.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Taylor, Preface, p. 7. According to Aristotle, philosophers like Thales try to explain what bodies are made of, but have nothing to say about incorporeal entities, “though incorporeal entities also really exist.”(Ch. 8, p. 108) I agree with Aristotle that the incorporeal are an important class of entities. He would probably say that God is incorporeal, while I would describe the life- and death-instincts as incorporeal, and the connectedness of things as incorporeal.
Early philosophers discussed matter — water, air, fire, etc. — because the human mind is comfortable with matter, it evolved to deal with matter. As I said in a recent issue, “The human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools” (this is a quote from Bergson). So perhaps it’s not surprising that philosophy began with matter, and only later discussed the immaterial. back |
| 2. | This is a quote from Taylor, not Aristotle. It comes from Taylor’s summary of Chapter 3 of the Metaphysics (see Taylor, p. 47). The Mind or Nous of Anaxagoras is an interesting idea, but ambiguous. Is he referring to intuition or reason? Could we call the life- and death-instincts Mind? Is he referring to smart matter — some sort of tendency toward connection and order in matter itself? Or is Anaxagoras referring to the mind of a divine architect? back |
| 3. | Aristotle mentions walks on p. 150 back |
| 4. | Ch. 3, p. 85, quoting Aristotle, not Taylor back |
| 5. | Appendix B, footnote 1, p. 153. “Aristotle’s biological interest leads him to conceive of this final stage of the development as in all cases a conscious or subconscious purpose immanent throughout all the previous stages.” back |
| 6. | Quote from Taylor; see Appendix B, p. 152, footnote 1 back |
| 7. | Appendix C, pp. 153, 154. People who look at history often say that chance plays a big role, just as people who look at evolution emphasize chance. But if we consider what Aristotle called Final Cause, if we consider fate/destiny, then the role of chance shrinks.
Consider, for example, the sinking of the Titanic. It can be viewed as the result of chance: the lookout lacked binoculars because the previous lookout forgot to leave a key to the binocular-box; the radio-operator received a warning about icebergs, but became busy with personal messages, and didn’t tell the captain about the warning; a ship called the Californian was within sight of the Titanic, but didn’t respond to distress-messages, for unknown reasons; a lifeboat-rehearsal was scheduled but didn’t take place.
We can make a long list of the mischances that led to the Titanic disaster. But if we reflect that the disaster was foreseen long before it occurred, then we begin to suspect that the role of destiny was larger than the role of chance. As I wrote in an earlier issue, the Titanic disaster was “prophesied 14 years before it occurred. ‘In 1898 [says Wikipedia], Morgan Robertson published a book called Futility in which a ship called Titan sinks after colliding with an iceberg. There are striking similarities between the Titan and the Titanic disasters: both ships sank in the North Atlantic during April, both did not have enough lifeboats, both were travelling at an excessive speed, and both were considered the largest ships of their time.” back |
| 8. | See Taylor, Appendix C, p. 154, footnote, quoting Plato’s Republic, 595c back |
| 9. | In an earlier issue, I wrote, “Aristotle argued that the Forms don’t exist in an invisible world, a world separate from things themselves; rather, they exist in things themselves. ‘The “form” only exists in the individual sensible thing, and is just its “essential character.”’ The relation between universals and particulars is, in Taylor’s view, one of the major problems in philosophy, and Socrates was the first to wrestle with it.” Here again is a problem that I think is obsolete, only interesting from a historical perspective, no longer at the cutting-edge of knowledge.
Aristotle says that Plato divided the world into the pure realm of Ideas, and the impure realm of “stuff”; Plato referred to this stuff as the Great and Small. The realm of Ideas causes Good, the realm of stuff causes Evil.(see Ch. 6, p. 105) back |
| 10. | This is a quote from Taylor, see Summary, Ch. IX, p. 56. Aristotle writes, “Mathematics has been turned by our present-day thinkers into the whole of Philosophy, in spite of their declaration that it ought to be studied for the sake of something further.”(Taylor, Ch. 9, pp. 132, 133) back |
| 11. | Yet another source of Plato’s Ideas was the notion that, since the sensible world was in flux and couldn’t be known with certainty, there must be another realm that was stable and permanent, and could be known with certainty. Taylor writes, “Since there is exact and absolute truth, there must be a corresponding class of objects of knowledge, viz., the eternal, immutable Ideas.” I would argue that we shouldn’t assume that absolute truth exists, therefore we shouldn’t infer that eternal Ideas exist. back |
| 12. | Empedocles believed in four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. He realized that, while bone isn’t an element, it’s an important substance. He said that bone consisted of a fixed proportion of certain elements. And he’s probably right, bone probably does consist of fixed amounts of certain elements, though we would define the elements differently than he did.(See Ch. 10, footnote 3, pp. 138, 139) back |
| 13. | See Ch. 5, p. 93. Antichthon was said to orbit opposite Earth, hence it’s sometimes called “Counter-Earth.” According to the Pythagoreans, the ten revolving bodies are Earth, Antichthon, Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and FixedStars.
“If the Sun is a ‘revolving body,’ what do the other revolving bodies revolve around?” They revolve around a hypothetical “central fire,” which is invisible from Earth. Perhaps this isn’t an absurd idea, if we consider that the sun does indeed revolve around the center of the galaxy, and the galactic center is indeed invisible from earth (at least to the naked eye). Here’s an illustration of the central fire, with other bodies revolving around it. “CE” is “Counter-Earth” (I’m not sure why it isn’t opposite earth). 
|
| 14. | Ch. 5, p. 95. It’s not clear if this is Aristotle’s own view, or Aristotle’s paraphrase of other thinkers. And it’s not clear if polarity plays an important role in Aristotle’s philosophy. back |
| 15. | This is a quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. See Taylor’s Introduction, p. 22. back |
| 16. | This is a quote from Taylor, see his Introduction, p. 27 back |
| 17. | Taylor, Ch. 9, pp. 136, 137. Elsewhere Aristotle writes, “All instruction and all processes of intellectual learning depend upon the presence of antecedent cognitions.”(Appendix A, p. 143) What does he mean by “intellectual” learning? Taylor explains: “The qualifying epithet is intended to exclude cognition through immediate sense-perception on the one hand and the immediate intuition of ultimate axioms on the other.”(footnote 1, p. 143)
I might mention that liber can mean free or book. The two versions of liber were probably written the same but pronounced differently. Liber originally meant the inner bark of a tree, then it came to mean book since books were made from this inner bark (as we might refer to a diploma as a “sheepskin” since diplomas were once made from sheepskins). back |
| 18. | Ch. 9, p. 137. On p. 145, Aristotle says that if fundamental truths are “unconsciously present from the first,” that would be “strange.” back |
| 19. | Jung seemed to have memories of ancestral experiences, memories that were a kind of reincarnation. In his autobiography, Jung says, “an ancient green carriage... drove past our house one day. It was truly an antique, looking exactly as if it had come straight out of the eighteenth century. When I saw it, I felt with great excitement: ‘That’s it! Sure enough, that comes from my times.’ It was as though I had recognized it because it was the same type as the one I had driven in myself.”
On another occasion, Jung saw a statuette of an 18th-century doctor with “buckled shoes which in a strange way I recognized as my own. I was convinced that these were shoes I had worn. The conviction drove me wild with excitement. ‘Why, those must be my shoes!’ I could still feel those shoes on my feet.... Often in those days I would write the date 1786 instead of 1886, and each time this happened I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia.”
According to Wikipedia, “Plato evinces a belief in the theory of reincarnation in multiple dialogues (such as the Phaedo and Timaeus).... He uses this idea of reincarnation to introduce the concept that knowledge is a matter of recollection of things acquainted with before one is born, and not of observation or study.” back |
| 20. | Taylor writes, “The two alternatives, both of which [Aristotle] finds unsatisfactory, are pure Empiricism and the Platonic doctrine of recollection, which he interprets as a theory of ‘innate ideas.’ He proceeds to mediate between these alternatives much as Leibniz did between the doctrines of Locke and Descartes.”(Taylor, Appendix A, p. 145, footnote 1) back |
| 21. | These quotes are apparently from Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora; they can be found in Appendix A, p. 148. back |
| 22. | This quote is apparently from Aristotle’s Ethics; it can be found in Appendix A, p. 149. back |
| 23. | Ch. 8, p. 114 back |
| 24. | p. 114, footnote 1 back |
| 25. | Appendix A, footnote 4, p. 149 back |