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.
