Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism)

The claim

Form and matter are not separate realms. A thing's form is in it, its nature is an inner tendency toward what it is becoming, and knowledge begins with the particulars in front of you.

What it held

Aristotle's disagreement with Plato is about location. He accepts that knowledge is of forms; he denies that forms exist apart from the things that have them. The form of a horse is in horses. This single move brings philosophy back down to the observable and licenses a research programme that ran for two thousand years.

The four causes are the tool. To explain anything, say what it is made of, what its form is, what brought it into being and what it is for — and the last of those, the final cause, is the one modern science eventually abandoned and the one that made the system so hospitable to theology.

The range is the astonishing part. The Lyceum produced the first formal logic, the first systematic biology, the first constitutional survey, the first poetics, the first ethics organised around character rather than rules. Theophrastus catalogued plants; someone collected 158 constitutions. This is a research institute rather than a set of doctrines.

How it argued

Begin with what is commonly said and what appears to be the case, expose the difficulties, and keep as much of the appearances as the argument allows. Then classify, and explain by cause.

What it was arguing against

Plato's separated Forms, on the grounds that they explain nothing and multiply what has to be accounted for. Also the atomists, for dispensing with purpose.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the active intellect is part of the individual or something shared — an obscurity in three lines of On the Soul that generated a thousand years of argument in Arabic and Latin. Whether the world is eternal, which the later religious traditions could not accept.

Common misconceptions

That Aristotelianism is armchair speculation corrected by experiment. Aristotle dissected, observed and collected specimens, and his account of the octopus and the catfish are accurate enough to have been confirmed in the nineteenth century. What he lacked was measurement, not observation.

How it began

Aristotle taught in the Lyceum from 335 BCE after twenty years in Plato's Academy and a period tutoring Alexander. The school's name comes from the covered walkway where discussion happened.

What became of it

The school declined in the Hellenistic period and the texts nearly disappeared. Recovered and edited by Andronicus in the first century BCE, they were then transmitted through Syriac and Arabic before returning to Latin Europe in the twelfth century as an intellectual detonation.

Lasting influence

Islamic falsafa, Jewish Aristotelianism, and the whole of scholasticism. Aquinas calls him simply the Philosopher. The vocabulary of substance, essence, potential, category and syllogism is his.

Why it still matters

Virtue ethics is a live and growing position in moral philosophy, and it is his. So is the idea that biological explanation legitimately refers to function.

Put another way

An acorn, which is not a small oak but an oak in potential, and whose nature is what it is heading toward.

Where to start

Nicomachean Ethics, books I and II. He is arguing about something everyone already cares about.

The surprising bit

Almost nothing he polished for publication survives. What we have are lecture notes — which is why the prose is so compressed, and why Cicero, who read the published dialogues, praised his golden eloquence.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Old Academy

Opposed by

Atomism

Influenced

Falsafa, Jewish Aristotelianism, Early Scholasticism, Thomism

The verdict

The most complete intellectual system anyone has produced, and the hardest to escape once you have absorbed it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy