Questions tagged [aristotle]
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, famous for his prolific writings on a vast array of subjects, including logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and even the natural sciences. He is widely considered a "founding figure" in Western philosophy.
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AI and Aristotle’s Four Causes: The Efficient vs. The Formal Cause
I’m trying to apply Aristotle’s 'Four Causes' to a debate I had about AI, and I’m hitting a wall.
Here is how I see it...
When I use an AI, I am the Efficient Cause (the source of movement). I’m the ...
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How did Thomas Aquinas reconcile between Aristotle's belief in the eternity of the universe and the story of biblical creation?
Given that Thomas Aquinas popularised Aristotle during the medieval age, I am quite interested in knowing how did he reconcile between the two ideas. On one hand, Aristotle believed in the eternity of ...
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Is "water seeks its own level" an argument from Aristotelian physics? [closed]
The aphorism “water seeks its own level”, first articulated by Samuel Rowbotham in 1849, has been repurposed in contemporary flat-earth discourse. In particular Eric Dubay, whose 2004 digital ...
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Does object realism about mathematics require some sort of "mathematical matter"?
Note: the original conception of substance, per Aristotle, was not identical or even equivalent to the common sense of substance as "stuff," even though Aristotle seems to have been aware ...
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Does the Arostotelian species-genus concept apply to non-living things?
I’ve always found this species-genus business pretty confusing and mind-numbing. I still don’t understand what a genus is.
Based on my understanding, those concepts only apply to life, or is that not ...
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Materialistic vs idealistic understanding of Aristotle's eudaimonia?
It is one thing to give an account of what leads to happiness, and quite another to explain what happiness is.
Aristotle probably would have rejected such questions as confused,
because they treat ...
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What is "Luck"? How should we aggregate "Luck" across multiple lucky or unlucky events? [closed]
What do we mean by Luck, and what does that say about how we ought to combine Luck values across events?
In philosophical terms, we might say that Luck is about events that are contingent and never ...
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Compatibility between Madhyamaka and aristotelianism
Madhyamaka—the Indo-Tibetan scholastic systematization of Buddhism—rests on three core theses:
(A1) Everything is reducible to parts and composition never ultimately occurs.
(A2) Every phenomenon is ...
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Was Aristotle a counter-revolutionary to Plato's revolution?
I recently read some Lyndon LaRouche, who was a quite controversial figure in politics and philosophy. According to him, Aristotle was not what we usually think him to be, which is this loyal student ...
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Neo-Aristotelian theories of art and aesthetics?
Are there any interesting neo-Aristotelian approaches to art and aesthetics that you're familiar with?
In general, I really appreciate Aristotelian philosophy, but I find the classic thesis art = ...
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Does aristotelian hylomorphism violate mereological antisymmetry in the statue-bronze case?
In mereology, the antisymmetry condition says that if A is part of B and B is part of A, then A and B must be identical.
In the hylomorphic framework, the bronze (B) is part of the statue (S), because ...
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What is active vs. passive potency?
In Latin, potentia means "potentiality" (something passive/receptive to an agent/actualizer), but why does it also have the sense of "power" (something active)?
This is further ...
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Help me to understand Aristotle's two lists of the Categories (4 and 10)
I’m working through Aristotle’s Categories, and I see he first splits beings into four types (based on “said of” vs “present in”) and then lists ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, etc.). I ...
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Is a non-foundationalist Aristotle possible?
In contemporary metaphysics and epistemology, anti-foundationalism rejects both ultimate metaphysical bedrocks and self-evident epistemic first principles. The position usually takes one of two shapes:...
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Where did Aristotle say stargazing is “the primary experience of wonder”?
Andrew Senior, the son of the realist American philosopher John Senior, wrote in his forewords to his father's The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture:
Aristotle and ...
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