Essay on The Significance of Aristotle is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on The Significance of Aristotle at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

A popular contrast opposes the visionary, other-worldly Plato to the hard-headed but rather boring Aristotle. As Yeats says:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings.

This contrast began among the Platonists of later antiquity; while some fused Platonic and Aristotelian views, others reacted by opposing mundane Aristotelianism to high-minded Platonism.

We have seen reasons to challenge the other-worldly view of Plato; and there are equally good reasons to challenge the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. While Aristotle is partly a naturalist and partly a Platonist, he is primarily a critical defender of Plato. He thinks Plato was right on major points on which the Presocratic naturalists were wrong, and that he made a permanent contribution to the understanding of nature and of the human good. Plato only half understood (in Aristotle's view) his advances over the naturalists; for he entangled some of his important advances with errors from which Aristotle seeks to free them. Aristotle tries to show that Plato was right to insist on the reality of form, on natural teleology, and on the harmony of justice and self-interest; and he tries to free these true Platonic claims from any dependence on the Theory of Forms, the immaterial soul, and the authoritarian ideal state.

Aristotle's acknowledged influence on his immediate successors, the Stoics and the Epicureans, is less than might be expected; doubts have even been expressed about whether they knew most of Aristotle's works. Though the doubts are probably mistaken, the fact that they could be raised suggests that Aristotle did not become a philosophical authority for philosophers of the next few generations. In fact both Stoics and Epicureans rejected Aristotelian metaphysics for more thoroughly materialist doctrines; and the later Platonists reasserted his defence of form in. thoroughly immaterialist, other-worldly terms, influenced by their reading of Aristotle in the light of their interpretation of Plato.

His influence on mediaeval philosophy contrasts sharply with his position in later antiquity. After the rediscovery of Aristotle in the early middle ages, he became the primary authority, 'the Philosopher'; and not only philosophy, but also natural science and theology, were conducted within assumptions taken to be Aristotelian (though often partly influenced by later Platonism).

Aristotle's authority made him an irresistible target for early modern philosophers attacking the mediaeval scholasticism derived from him. Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Berkeley could all appeal to the success of modern science, which had freed itself from the assumptions of Aristotelian cosmology and astronomy. They supposed that Aristotle's general philosophical position should be rejected together with the particular empirical assumptions that had been superseded by modern science. His doctrine of substantial forms seemed to involve strange non-empirical mechanisms that had been discredited by better scientific theories. These attacks on Aristotle seemed to Hume to have succeeded so completely that in 1748 he could write: 'The fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed.'

His critics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not entirely wrong. When Aristotle relies on appearances and common sense, he is in danger of treating error, prejudice, or superficial assumptions as firm data to be accepted by every reasonable theory. One bad effect of his over-confidence appears in the attitude of the astronomer Ptolemy to the assumption that the earth tends towards the centre of the universe:

So I, for one, think it gratuitous for anyone to inquire into the causes of the motion towards the centre once the fact that the earth occupies the middle place in the universe, and that all weights move towards it, is made so patent by the observed phenomena themselves.

In this case the 'observed phenomena' make it unreasonable, in Ptolemy's view, even to consider challenging the view that the earth is the centre of the universe and that the sun moves around the earth. Sometimes, however, the right theory is found only if apparently clear observations are rejected or reinterpreted.

On the other hand, it would be wrong to suppose that Aristotle's philosophical position as a whole is undermined by this sort of criticism; and the revival of Aristotle's reputation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is partly the result of a more discriminating attitude to him. No one could now reasonably regard him as the supreme authority; but neither could anyone reasonably agree with Hume's estimate. The questions that he tries to answer, about matter, form, causation, teleology, body, soul, happiness, and morality, are philosophical questions that persist, with surprisingly little change, through changes in science, religion, and culture. Aristotle's answers to them are not obsolete. On the contrary, his claim to defend the reality and non-eliminability of forms and souls, and his account of the place of morality in the human good, present reasonable options that have sometimes been prematurely abandoned, and have not yet been adequately explored. . .

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.