Roochnik: Aristotle

We find here that although Aristotle is a student of Plato, he greatly differs in his relationship with the Presocratics and their study of nature. Whereas Plato is primarily considered with studying logoi, of what human beings have to say, he studies nature, but he also takes the influence of Plato with him by including Forms and his concern for the best possible human life. He took these forms and brought them down to earth and although they still bear the weight of objective truth they are not ontologically separate from particulars. So Aristotle's view of forms will definitely be explored throughout this chapter of Roochnik. It is structured where first he addresses Aristotle's conception of nature, second will discuss his psychology, and the final two sections will treat Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, the works he most directly developed the legacy of Platonism.

What he means in saying "Of beings, some are by nature, while others are by other causes" is that some beings move themselves, in the sense of the Presocratics arche (first principle) in that I am the origin of my own movement. No external force needs to be applied to me because I have desires and move toward what I want, although I can be affected by external forces. A sort of change is the self-originated natural motion he is referring to, such as decay or growth or my hair turning grey. For change to be natural though it must emmanate from a living being, so the example he gives is the construction of a house and the wear and tear and repair it goes through over time. All of its change is due to external forces. Whereas my aging may have some alterations due to external forces, but it all stems from inside me. But it isn't just living things that he refers to as natural. He also talks of simple bodies which are earth, fire, air, water and each of these lifeless bodies have a principle of motion and rest in themselves. For example without other force fire and air would move upward toward its natural place in the heavens above whereas earth and water would move downward.

From all this we can see that Aristotle's worldview is a "Cosmos", a limited, hierarchical organized world where its center is the earth and its zenith is in the perfectly circular orbit of the fixed stars. One aspect I found really interesting here is the four causes which I had not previously heard of. So we have the "material cause" which answers the question what is this made of, then the "formal cause" which answers what is it, the efficient cause which answers what moved or produced it (this is closer to our modern day view of cause), and "final cause" is something's goal, purpose or end (telos) and it answers what is it for (his example is health which is understood as the 'end' of walking. So we can say that these causes are an indicator of the way we speak about causes and from Aristotle's perspective a good grasp of the reality of causes.

So this is the general sort of scope for his conception of nature that I was given starting out with Roochnick, but the rest of his chapter on Aristotle dives into his Ethics and Politics which are interesting and only somewhat helpful to my final project.