This guide is part of my Introduction To Philosophy Class offered through The Micro-University on Substack. In this guide, I provide an introduction to the metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle. If you are interested in learning more about the course, you can follow this link.
Aristotle is not only the greatest ancient philosopher but also, in my opinion, the greatest philosopher of all time.
It is possible to quibble about where exactly to “rank” Aristotle, but no one could reasonably doubt that he is amongst the top 5 most important philosophers in the history of the world.
I am pretty convinced that he is the greatest, although I am open to someone changing my mind.
Perhaps the only thing you could say against Aristotle is that he is a philosopher’s philosopher — utterly obsessed with technical detail, clarity, and rational argument. This means he can be boring if one is reading him without a good reason.
What’s undeniable is that he was the most prolific philosopher of all time.
I was taught at some point that we possess an estimated 25% of what Aristotle actually wrote. Had that corpus survived today, it would exceed 12,000 modern pages. Aristotle’s current Complete Works is around 3,500 pages in modern formatting. Cicero is reported to have said that Aristotle wrote an entire collection of his own philosophical dialogues which not only rivaled those of Plato, but were like a “rivers of flowing gold”, while Plato’s were “silver”.
Despite Aristotle’s incredible output, we are fortunate to have anything he wrote.
After Aristotle died, his writings were left to individuals who didn’t really value or understand them and locked away in a wooden chest in a cave.
Unfortunately, many of his works got wet and didn’t survive.
The works that did survive would go on to disappear and resurface at various points. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, much of Aristotle’s works were lost to the Latin West. Categories were one of two significant logical works that were available in the early Middle Ages.
Many of Aristotle’s works would go on to be rediscovered and propagated thanks to a handful of Muslim scholars in the 8th through 10th centuries whose efforts would eventually bring Aristotle back into the fold of “European” thought.
Aristotle was so well-regarded throughout history that medieval Muslim scholars called him “The First Teacher”, whereas St. Thomas Aquinas simply called him “The Philosopher”.
An entire guide could be written simply listing all of the original contributions Aristotle made to philosophy, and it would be quite long and complex.
In place of that, I would like to make two points:
Aristotle wrote serious works on every subject matter imaginable: Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, Poetry, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, Biology, etc.
He is widely considered the father of Logic itself (meaning that he was the first human being to formalize Logical thought into a system).
In this guide, I aim to touch upon two very distinct themes (although everything in Aristotle is ultimately connected):
Metaphysics
Ethics
The reason that I chose to focus on Categories and Nicomachean Ethics is that these two works capture Aristotle’s essence as a philosopher and help beginner’s understand how he synthesized theoretical and practical philosophy into a unified theory of everything.
Our foray into Aristotelian metaphysics will help readers learn a bit about Plato’s famous Theory Of The Forms by seeing how Aristotle rejected and innovated on Plato’s account in Categories, while our study of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics will help readers situate Aristotle in relation to Socratic and Platonic ethics.
If there is one thing that I would like readers to take away from this brief study of Aristotle, it would be a appreciation for the power of the human mind to apprehend fundamental truths about reality with very little to go on. Additionally, even though many of Aristotle’s ideas have been replaced or disproven, it is also true that many of them are what made their own replacement possible in the first place, and many others continue to endure (especially in his practical works).
Categories
The work titled Categories is one of the most significant texts Aristotle ever wrote and plays a key role in Aristotle’s philosophy.
It is one of the essential works of a collection of technical texts which have come to be called “The Organon”. The word organon is an English transliteration of the Ancient Greek Ὄργανον, which means “instrument”, “tool”, or “organ”. Under this heading, Aristotle’s editors have collected six works that deal with matters of logical analysis and dialectical argument. You can roughly think of these works as a kind of “handbook” for thinking.
In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon completely changed the world with the publication of his Novum Organum, directly challenging the then dominant Aristotelian worldview and setting the West onto a new path of modern science, epistemology, and metaphysics that still shapes our thinking today.
The Organon consists of the following six works:
Categories (Latin: Categoriae): Aristotle’s classification system for being and famous discussion of “primary substance”.
On Interpretation (Latin: De Interpretatione): Aristotle’s conception of propositions, judgement, and the relationships between affirmative, negative, universal, and particular propositions.
Prior Analytics (Latin: Analytica Priora): Aristotle’s famous syllogistic method of logic and inductive inference.
Posterior Analytics (Latin: Analytica Posteriora): Aristotle’s account of definition, demonstration, inductive reasoning, and scientific knowledge.
Topics (Latin: Topica): Aristotle’s account of valid argument, and probable inference.
On Sophistical Refutations (Latin: De Sophisticis Elenchis): Aristotle’s treatment of logical fallacies.
My focus in this guide will be on the short, but dense work titled Categories.
It is possible, within a few short pages, to get a sense of how Aristotle thought and also how his views differed from Plato’s.
One of the most significant conclusions of Aristotelian philosophy is given expression in Categories — the idea that reality is constituted out of a plurality of what are called primary substances.
Primary substances are beings like me and you, Fido, and General Sherman (not the man, but the giant tree!).
There is something appealing about the idea that singular human beings are the most unique and important kinds of things there are.
This is a classic case of anthropocentricmaxxing!
The Categories is one of the earliest works in the West on a sub-field of philosophy called “Ontology”.
We have already encountered Ontology before with Heraclitus and Parmenides, but Aristotle takes Ontology to an entirely new level of sophistication and sensitivity to language.
As far as we know, the Categories represents one of the earliest works of ontology written by Aristotle and may have been composed while he was studying at Plato’s Akadēmia (Ἀκαδημία).
Although Aristotle’s Ontology would change throughout his lifetime, his early works contain many ideas that either endured throughout his later thinking, or were reworked into new ideas. Many of these ideas continue to influence philosophy today when it comes to fundamental discussions about thought and being.
The fundamental nature of these works makes them difficult to understand or interpret, and serious scholars can spend years thinking through their deep implications for thought, language, and reality.
Overview
In the “Pre-Categories” (sections 1-3), Aristotle presents his famous four-fold division that is built out of two different forms of predication:
“said-of” (legetai)
“in” (en)
Aristotle’s distinctions help clarify the complexity of predication relations that are easily obscured by natural language.
This is no mere superficial quality of language for Aristotle, but a window through which we can apprehend the deep metaphysical structure of reality itself and the relationships between “things that are”.
For Aristotle, nature is a complex structure and our language should reflect that.
It is helpful to understand Aristotle’s distinction here as tracking one of the most important distinctions that is still used today in contemporary metaphysics, and which was used extensively in the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers:
The distinction between essential and accidental predication.
According to Christopher Shields, Aristotle’s primary intention was to:
“divide universals into those predicated essentially of primary substances and those not so predicated: substantial universals are predicated of substances alone, and always essentially, while nonsubstance universals may be predicated accidentally of substances but essentially of non-substances”
What is a universal? What is a substance? And what is predication?
“Universals” are a standard concept in Metaphysics that are used to pick out what particular things have in common (e.g., qualities). If you walk into a classroom and there are 25 different chairs, the universal Chair is the thing which unifies each individual chair via the quality or property of chairness or being a chair. While it’s natural to think that each chair in the classroom is a unique entity, universals allow for multiple instantiation (instances).
Since universals seem to violate the constraints that ordinary physical objects are bound by, they are typically treated as abstract entities, meaning that they are immaterial objects or entities (it’s worth mentioning that numbers provide an example of a particular entity that is abstract — it need not be the case that all and only universals are abstract, and all and only particulars are concrete, but this is the norm).
Not everyone believes universals are real entities.
Those who deny universals are typically called Nominalists.
Nominalists hold that there are only particular concrete entities and deny the reality of universals. The label “nominalism” comes from “name”. Nominalists hold that universals are just fancy labels or names, but not real entities themselves.
In seeking to “divide universals into those predicated essentially of primary substances and those not so predicated”, Aristotle was spinning out a unique metaphysical view according to which there are two types of universals — those that are connected to the essence of a primary substance and those that are not.
What is an essence? What is a primary substance?
