Aristotle my Mentor

     
     My favourite philosopher and man on the planet was a guy called Aristotle. Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης [aristotélɛːs], Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing ethics, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.

  Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.       In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher".

The Four Causes According to Aristotle:

1. Material cause describes the material out of which something is composed.

2. The formal cause is its form, i.e., the arrangement of that matter. It tells us what a thing is, that anything is determined by the definition, form, pattern, essence, whole, synthesis or archetype. It embraces the account of causes in terms of fundamental principles or general laws, as the whole is the cause of its parts, a relationship known as the whole-part causation.

3. The efficient cause is "the primary source", or that from which the change or the ending of the change first starts. It identifies 'what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed' and so suggests all sorts of agents, nonliving or living, acting as the sources of change or movement or rest.

4. The final cause is its purpose, or that for the sake of which a thing exists or is done, including both purposeful and instrumental actions and activities. The final cause or telos is the purpose or end that something is supposed to serve, or it is that from which and that to which the change is.

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

Personal views regarding Aristotle's Philosophy

         

  According to Aristotle ‘Man's intellectual capacity is his highest capacity, and therefore his highest happiness resides in the use of that capacity. The life of contemplation is so sublime that it is practically divine, and man can achieve it only insofar as there is something divine in him. Contemplation is the action which best fulfils all the qualifications that the ultimate good should have, because it is the most continuous, complete and self-sufficient of all actions.’ So when we talk about the reality of life – the striving, struggle and persistence to live worthy and or comfortably with prosperity, these would just all be vanity of all vanities for these are all peripheries of what is beyond our expectations accordingly, as the adage goes ‘All things have time, and all things under the sun pass by their spaces.’

       Thereupon, living intellectually is the very essence of a happy and worthy life. And intellectual life proceeds with what is good. Things of any variety have a characteristic function that they are properly used to perform. The good for human beings, then, must essentially involve the entire proper function of human life as a whole, and this must be an activity of the soul that expresses genuine virtue or excellence. (Nic. Ethics I 7) Thus, human beings should aim at a life in full conformity with their rational natures; for this, the satisfaction of desires and the acquisition of material goods are less important than the achievement of virtue. A happy person will exhibit a personality appropriately balanced between reasons and desires, with moderation characterizing all. In this sense, at least, "virtue is its own reward." True happiness can therefore be attained only through the cultivation of the virtues that make a human life complete.

On Friendship

      To a friend you must wish good for his own sake. If you wish things this way, but the same wish is not returned by the other, you would be said to have only goodwill for the other. For friendship is said to be reciprocated goodwill. So friends must be well-disposed towards each other, and recognized as wishing each other's good.

     As Aristotle was saying, when you have thrown a stone in the sea, you cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the unjust and profligate might at the outset have avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although when they have become unjust and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.

      Genuine friendship must be based on goodness; what rests on pleasantness (as with the young), or on utility (as with the old), is only to be recognized conventionally as friendship. In perfection it cannot subsist without perfect mutual knowledge, and only between the good; hence it is not possible for anyone to have many real friends.

      Friendship is a kind of exchange - equal between equals, and proportional between unequals; a repayment. This suggests various questions as to priority of claim e.g. between paying your father's ransom and repaying a loan, both being in a sort the repayment of a debt. No fixed law can be laid down i.e. it cannot be said that one obligation at all times and in all circumstances over-rides all others.

      The good man is self-sufficing, but friends are desirable, if not actually necessary to him, as giving scope for the exercise of beneficent activities, not as conferring benefits upon him. Besides, man's highest activities must be exercised not in isolation, but as a member of society, and such life lacks completeness if without friends. Finally, friendship attains its completest realization where comradeship is complete; that is to say, in a common life. 

Reference: Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics Books