Ancient Philosophy

Lecture Notes
11-16-06

Explaining Essence of Spacio-Temporal Things: Aristotle

-When you get out of the categories, primary substance is just substance. Substance is
just a “this” that you can point at.

-The soul does not survive death – it’s the form that holds a house together. The soul is
merely the organization of physical parts and once the soul is gone, there is no more
unification.

-The highest organizing principle gives you the nature of things.

-Essence controls movement and change

-What your essence is, is what is true of you for every possible way the world/events
could have gone.

-It’s always forms that’ll be directing us.

-Forms masters and constrains the lower-levels – when it gets to strong for higher levels
to control, the organism dies.

-Does Socrates have his own form of human beingness? Aristotle would say NO
because his form is eternal (e.g. the piglet would have the same form as father pig)

The Difference b/t Aristotle and Plato’s View (p. 261)

-Aristotle supposed to have a moderate view, and Plato’s is radical/going too far. The
explanation (based on e.g. in the case of Socrates and the color blue):

-To say Socrates and the color blue both exist would be meaningless bc they
have no genus above them in common bc Socrates is a substance and the color
blue is a quality. They’re not comparable bc they are not of the same values.
Aristotle is basically saying that both the color blue and Socrates are
systematically ambiguous, they only exist in the secondary sense (non-
substance). So it’s not that they’re nothing, but they’re not something either.

-Plato says there’s either something or nothing.

-The notion of dependency – people tend to mistakenly think that if something doesn’t
exist in the primary, then it can’t exist in the secondary. But something can exist
eternally and could just exist in the secondary sense. Aristotle thinks they still exist, just
in different senses.

-The packet reading (in first passage) will talk about the views Aristotle does NOT have.