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قراءة كتاب Aristotle
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First Philosophy Mathe- Physics
or matics
Theology
Practical Philosophy is not subjected by Aristotle to any similar subdivision. Later students were accustomed to recognise a threefold division into Ethics (the theory of individual conduct), Economics (the theory of the management of the household), Politics (the theory of the management of the State). Aristotle himself does not make these distinctions. His general name for the theory of conduct is Politics, the doctrine of individual conduct being for him inseparable from that of the right ordering of society. Though he composed a separate course of lectures on individual conduct (the Ethics), he takes care to open the course by stating that the science of which it treats is Politics, and offers an apology for dealing with the education of individual character apart from the more general doctrine of the organisation of society. No special recognition is given in Aristotle's own classification to the Philosophy of Art. Modern students of Aristotle have tried to fill in the omission by adding artistic creation to contemplation and practice as a third fundamental form of mental activity, and thus making a threefold division of Philosophy into Theoretical, Practical, and Productive. The object of this is to find a place in the classification for Aristotle's famous Poetics and his work on Rhetoric, the art of effective speech and writing. But the admission of the third division of Science has no warrant in the text of Aristotle, nor are the Rhetoric and Poetics, properly speaking, a contribution to Philosophy. They are intended as collections of practical rules for the composition of a pamphlet or a tragedy, not as a critical examination of the canons of literary taste. This was correctly seen by the dramatic theorists of the seventeenth century. They exaggerated the value of Aristotle's directions and entirely misunderstood the meaning of some of them, but they were right in their view that the Poetics was meant to be a collection of rules by obeying which the craftsman might make sure of turning out a successful play. So far as Aristotle has a Philosophy of Fine Art at all, it forms part of his more general theory of education and must be looked for in the general discussion of the aims of education contained in his Politics.
The Methods of Science.--No place has been assigned in the scheme to what we call logic and Aristotle called Analytics, the theory of scientific method, or of proof and the estimation of evidence. The reason is that since the fundamental character of proof is the same in all science, Aristotle looks upon logic as a study of the methods common to all science. At a later date it became a hotly debated question whether logic should be regarded in this way as a study of the methods instrumental to proof in all sciences, or as itself a special constituent division of philosophy. The Aristotelian view was concisely indicated by the name which became attached to the collection of Aristotle's logical works. They were called the Organon, that is, the "instrument," or the body of rules of method employed by Science. The thought implied is thus that logic furnishes the tools with which every science has to work in establishing its results. Our space will only permit of a brief statement as to the points in which the Aristotelian formal logic appears to be really original, and the main peculiarities of Aristotle's theory of knowledge.
(a) Formal Logic.--In compass the Aristotelian logic corresponds roughly with the contents of modern elementary treatises on the same subject, with the omission of the sections which deal with the so-called Conditional Syllogism. The inclusion of arguments of this type in mediæval and modern expositions of formal logic is principally due to the Stoics, who preferred to throw their reasoning into these forms and subjected them to minute scrutiny. In his treatment of the doctrine of Terms, Aristotle avoids the mistake of treating the isolated name as though it had significance apart from the enunciations in which it occurs. He is quite clear on the all-important point that the unit of thought is the proposition in which something is affirmed or denied, the one thought-form which can be properly called "true" or "false." Such an assertion he analyses into two factors, that about which something is affirmed or denied (the Subject), and that which is affirmed or denied of it (the Predicate). Consequently his doctrine of the classification of Terms is based on a classification of Predicates, or of Propositions according to the special kind of connection between the Subject and Predicate which they affirm or deny. Two such classifications, which cannot be made to fit into one another, meet us in Aristotle's logical writings, the scheme of the ten "Categories," and that which was afterwards known in the Middle Ages as the list of "Predicaments" or "Heads of Predicates," or again as the "Five Words." The list of "Categories" reveals itself as an attempt to answer the question in how many different senses the words "is a" or "are" are employed when we assert that "x is y" or "x is a y" or "xs are ys." Such a statement may tell us (1) what x is, as if I say "x is a lion"; the predicate is then said to fall under the category of Substance; (2) what x is like, as when I say "x is white, or x is wise,"--the category of Quality; (3) how much or how many x is, as when I say "x is tall" or "x is five feet long,"--the category of Quantity; (4) how x is related to something else, as when I say "x is to the right of y," "x is the father of y,"--the category of Relation. These are the four chief "categories" discussed by Aristotle. The remainder are (5) Place, (6) Time, (7) and (8) Condition or State, as when I say "x is sitting down" or "x has his armour on,"--(the only distinction between the two cases seems to be that (7) denotes a more permanent state of x than (8)); (9) Action or Activity, as when I say "x is cutting," or generally "x is doing something to y"; (10) Passivity, as when I say "x is being cut," or more generally, "so-and-so is being done to x." No attempt is made to show that this list of "figures of predication" is complete, or to point out any principle which has been followed in its construction. It also happens that much the same enumeration is incidentally made in one or two passages of