Eurolit Homework for 10/19/18

Read: Blog notes on Aristotle lecture

Read: “Pleasure and Happiness”

Answer: Study Guide Questions (“Full Monty” optional)

Eurolit Notes for 10/19/18

Summum bonom: the highest good, especially as the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system

The summum bonom of Aristotle is happiness.

The key to success, according to Aristotle, is to always strive for excellence until it is a habit. Then the habit becomes part of your character.

Metaphysics:

Dualism

Ideas/Forms                                                  Illusions/Appearances

Universal (general)                                      Particular

Infinite                                                           Finite

Eternal                                                           Transitory

Unchanging                                                   Changing

Abstract                                                          Concrete

Metamaterial                                                 Material

Perfect (ideal)                                               Imperfect (copies)

(Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.)

Epistemology

Recognition

Deduction – from general to particular

A priori – before experience

Philosophy is an unusually persistent attempt to think things through clearly.

One of the chief things that Aristotle found fault with in Plato’s philosophy is motion. The entire world is in the process of change.

Aristotle’s philosophy is a posterori (after experience): we can only learn from experience. He believes we begin with the particular and move to the general.

Plato believes the opposite (a priori). Both are idealists, though, because they both believe that the intangible idea is the essence of existence.

According to Aristotle, everything is going from the potential to the actual. Everything has in it an inherent self-realization peculiar to itself.

Aristotle’s greatest complaint about Plato’s philosophy was that Plato puts the essence of things outside the things themselves. This implies some netherworld or mysterious world that the things in the material world have sprung from.

There is a universal idea of gold and its qualities (it is yellow, malleable, and heavy). If you take the gold’s qualities away from it, you have taken away the substance. The qualities have to coexist with the substance. What reality is is the universal in the particular. You can’t separate the universal from the particular.

Things come about by causation. By causation Aristotle means why something happens, rather than the mechanical cause.

Four basic causes:

Material (The material of which something is made.)

Efficient (What makes something change.)

Formal (The form something takes.)

Final (The defining cause which is last in causation, but first in ideas. Related to teleology.)

Teleology - the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.

The whole idea of teleology is that the end precedes the beginning logically.

Which comes first, the acorn or the oak? The acorn exists first in time, but why would the acorn exist if not to become the oak tree? Therefore, according to Aristotle, the oak tree comes first.