Aristotle is a leading figure in the ancient Greek philosophy, creating significant contributions to medicine, ethics, physics, metaphysics, zoology, biology, agriculture, dance and theatre, mathematics, and politics. He was Plato’s student who afterwards studied under Socrates. Aristotle was more empirically minded than Socrates or Plato and is widely known for rejecting Plato’s theory of forms . His findings gave modern science the inspiration it needed to advance and flourish. He studied geology, zoology, astronomy, physics, and geography. As a result of establishing his own school, he created huge contributions to science and others fields. Aristotle believed that the most effective approach to understanding nature is via close observation, …show more content…
He understood physics as the same as natural philosophy (i.e. the study of nature). His contribution to his natural philosophy is less impressive than his research work in biology, psychology, and zoology. In his natural philosophy, Aristotle included several characteristics inherited from his pre-Socratic predecessors . He adopted the point of view that the universe is made up of various combinations of the four major elements of fire, air, water, and earth. Each element is characterized by possessing a unique pair of the four basic qualities of dryness, cold, heat, and wetness: fire is dry and hot, air is wet and hot, water is wet and cold, and earth is dry and cold. Each element has a natural place in an ordered cosmos, and each component has an inherent habit of moving towards this natural place. Therefore, earthly solids naturally fall, whereas fire, if not prevented ever rises greater. Other motions of the components are possible although are …show more content…
According to Aristotle, the earth is the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, and other planets revolve around the earth. The heavenly bodies are not made of the four terrestrial elements, though are constituted of a superior fifth element (i.e. “quintessence”). Furthermore, the heavily bodies have supernatural intellects or souls that guide them in their movements through the cosmos. Even the best scientific works made by Aristotle are now historical interest. Aristotle’s cosmology made significant contribution regarding how the universe came into being. His cosmology was one of many influential ideas on the composition and configuration of the universe, and it managed to survive until the works of Galileo, Brahe, and Copernicus rendered it obsolete . His conception about the corporeal bodies being made of air, water, fire and earth suitably fitted with the humoral system that also has four states that Aristotelian cosmology borrowed from the medical concepts of the Hippocratics and
Aristotle’s model by today’s standards can easily be picked apart, but at the time, it was the best explanation that could be made with so little technology and insight. Although his theories have long since been replaced, they created a base for future scientists to work off of and challenge. Over time many great scientists began to question Aristotle’s theories. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), for example, contested the absolute significance of the earth, and he did not agree that it should be viewed as the center of the entire universe (Lizhi & Youquan, 1987). He plotted the earth at the center of the universe and created a heliocentric system just as mathematically complicated as the Ptolemaic system (one that also improved on Aristotle’s), but it explained a number of anomalies, including resolving the issue of retrograde motion (Ede, A. & Cormack, L., 2004). The problem was that Aristotle’s physics of ‘natural motion’ fell apart without the earth in the center of everything.
This question defines the nature of Aristotle’s inquiries, at least for a large part of the Metaphysics, and it thus offers a fourth account of the study or science of metaphysics.“The science of first principles, the study of being qua being, theology, the investigation into substance – four compatible descriptions of the same discipline? Perhaps there is no one discipline which can be identified as Aristotelian Metaphysics? And perhaps this thought should not disturb us: we need only recall that the metaphysics was composed by Andronicus rather than by Aristotle. But the four descriptions do have at least one thing in common: they are dark and obscure” (Ross, 1996, p174).
He began to study and collect sea creatures, and eventually extend his ideas to study sea animal to all living things. He created the first library in Greece, which attracted an impressive amount of scholars to the school he taught at called the Lyceum. Students were able to learn every subject imaginable at the time. Aristotle was credited with being the first thinker to recognize that knowledge is compartmentalized. The school was the center for teaching scientific reasoning and scientific research. Aristotle’s theories, at the time were revolutionary, but were later corrected. In his time he was known as “the man who knew everything.” Aristotle’s influence from his time and even after his death, are considered unparalleled, with the exception of his teacher, Plato his works continue to endure. His writings about how people perceived the world continues to underline many principles, and the knowledge people possessed, because of him people around the world share to solve problems.
Aristotle was one of the first to attempt an explanation of earthquakes based on natural phenomena. He postulated that winds within the earth whipped up the
He was the first to study formal logic, founded called the Lyceum and tutored kings. He influenced Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions and beliefs. The Catholic Church took his view of a universal hierarchy and added the divine, the heavenly and the demonic to make their “Great Chain of Being.” Aristotle even had a basic idea of evolution based on God’s plan for the world (IEP). It is possible that he was the last person to know everything there was to know in his own time (Neill 488). His contributions to our understanding of the world are innumerable, despite that only about a third of his work survived. He contributed to philosophy as much as Plato, if not more. He took Plato’s theory of forms and changed it, making it his own, and in the process resolved the problems that he had noted, as well as those pointed out by Plato and others. He called his new theory he called Hylomorphism. Hylomorphism’s way of thinking stands directly opposite that which Plato’s forms encourage. Aristotle did not see the world as a reflection of another filled with forms but as the physical embodiment of the forms. The substances are created by the innate forms in the matter and are the only way we can perceive forms. This means that to Aristotle a substance did not have form only in an abstract world of forms but was contained by the object in and of
Aristotle is a Greek teacher and is credited for establishing the cornerstone of modern philosophy via his book Para Psyche (Biography.com Editors). His work assumes the existence of divine power and tells that the reason the human body exists is to house our
Prior to Galileo’s time, the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism, a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things. The point was to give order to complicated data, and all that mattered was the hypothesis that was simplest to understand and most convenient. Astronomy and mathematics were regarded as the playthings of intellectuals. They were accounted as having neither philosophical nor theological relevance. There was genuine puzzlement among Churchmen that they had to get involved in a quarrel over planetary orbits.
Unlike his teacher, Plato, Aristotle believed that the world could be explained by physical observation. This approach of using the five senses, cataloguing and categorising, is the foundation of scientific study. The approach is known as empiricism. Plato believed that we needed to look beyond the physical for an explanation of the universe in the guise of the World of Forms. Aristotle disagreed with this.
Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems uses powerful logic and simply described concepts to overcome the Aristotelian bias of the populous and argue in favor of Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the universe. Copernicus theorized that the earth, along with the other planets in the sky, is in motion around the sun. The Aristotelian’s geocentric worldview, that the earth is the motionless center of the universe, was deeply ingrained into the minds of the people and the teachings of the church. Galileo’s argument had to be not only incisive and logical to have any sway, but it also had to avoid offending or denying the ancient principles of thought proposed by Aristotle. He walked this delicate line between educating the public and
Aristotle was one of the most important western philosophers. He was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. I found that his biggest impacts on modern society were in the subject areas of ethics, and zoology.
Aristotle's physics separated the universe into two main areas: the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm. The terrestrial realm was composed of the four elements: earth, wind, water and fire, which could each be either hot, wet, dry or cold, and the celestial realm made of ether, or what Aristotle called the "quintessence."
Plato, a man who believed by just thinking about it, you could understand and achieve fully, trained Aristotle in philosophy. Aristotle did not agree on Plato’s belief, and soon came up with his own. He believed that in order to understand, you must observe what is being studied by looking, listening or touching it. Aristotle’s method of studying is now the base of contemporary science. Modern scientists are now engineering more efficient and precise ways of observing. In conclusion, Aristotle awoke the world with the study of live, which grew to the study of modern science of phycology.
Aristotle was not just any person. He was one of the most distinguished and important Greek philosophers of all time. Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in the town of Stagira, Greece. His range of work was very broad, covering most of the sciences and many arts such as biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology, and zoology. He was the author of what became the foundation of both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy. Even after his death in 322 BCE and historic events such as enlightenment, Aristotle’s concepts still remain present in Western thinking and continue to be studied.
As Aristotle saw his general surroundings, he watched that things are moving and changing in certain ways. Aristotle found that specific things cause different things, which thusly bring about something else. Aristotle trusted that a boundless chain of causation was unrealistic, subsequently, a prime mover or some likeness thereof should exist as the main source of everything that progressions or moves.
of the east. The works of Aristotle have left many after him to contemplate his