The philosopher that followed Plato in the great tradition of Western philosophy is Aristotle. Very much like as this lecture follows the previous one, in many ways, Plato was a tough act to follow. Plato brought out a certain side of philosophy, the inspirational side, the side that Professor Ricciuti aptly called the side of wonderment. But there's another side of philosophy, which really, I think, is best represented by Plato's decision to make the world a better place. Aristotle and that is the scientific side rational explanation attempt to save the appearances of the universe and not describe them away as illusion Aristotle has been represented as a many ways a profound critic of Plato.
And there's some truth to this. Many of you may have seen the famed painting by Raphael of the Academy in Athens, where Plato was walking and pointing up to the heavens, and Aristotle saying, hey, chill out. Don't get too transcendental on me.
You'll become invisible. And there is something to that. I want to, however, argue that for all of his scientific predilections, and in fact he was far more interested in what we would call natural science than Plato, he wasn't as concerned with with number as he was with biology.
And his breakthroughs in biology remain to this day germane and important. He was the first to taxonomize, to place into genera and species the various sorts of animals and plants that we find. But I want to argue that in a way he's a defender of Plato. I think Aristotle was profoundly affected by the notion of the forms, of ideal essences, that in some way are the only thing that we can actually have knowledge of.
And the reason they're the only thing we can have knowledge of is because they're universal and eternal. They're unchanging. Therefore, they're a stable subject matter. And I think what he wants to do is take that intuition about the forms, right, essences, and preserve it from what I think Aristotle would have called Plato's transcendental excesses.
Think of it this way. He says, Plato, you came up with a wonderful idea. You came up with a wonderful idea. about the essences, and you had everybody sitting on the edge of your seat, and then you told them, and in fact, the essences are the only thing that exist, and this thing isn't really real, this podium or this area I walk on. This point is, that's a great idea of the forms, but if you say things like that, most people are going to look at you and scratch their head, because it is clearly, at some intuitive level, absurd to say that the watch isn't real, it's the form of the watch that's real.
Right? If you separate the forms from things, you literally bring the forms up to ridicule. And Aristotle was a scientifically literate person, and realized that the forms were an important idea that would be laughed at by scientifically advanced people.
That it would appear as what we might call it, a sort of Bronze Age metaphysics. Okay, so I want to argue that although there is an element of criticism, there's also an element of support, of appropriation. I'm going to take that idea of the forms and give it an expression so that scientifically literate people would not feel embarrassed to believe in it. And in fact, would see it's sensibility. Now, I would say that you can take anyone's metaphysics, especially Aristotle's, and break it into two different elements.
The science of being should tell you basically two things. One, what's there? What kind of stuff are we talking about? And secondly, how do things interrelate?
What are the causal relations? That is to say, returning to the Parmenidean and Heraclitian problem of change, how stable substances go into their others, other things. And accepting that problematic that the pre-socratics had formed, and Plato's attempt to deal with it, he attempted to explain change without doing violence to being, to reality, to existence. Okay, so the traditional place to begin in the discussion of Aristotle's metaphysics is with what he calls the four principles of explanation. And what he means by principle of explanation is a cause.
How do things interrelate in the universe? How do things come to be? And Aristotle argues for what we might call a quadripartite causal nexus. Basically, he says there's four ways you explain something. The first is what he calls formal explanation or formal cause.
And that's clearly a reference to Plato. One of the ways you explain something like, say, my watch, is to say, you define it. What makes a watch?
Right, what's the essence of a watch? So, you define a person, what's the essence of a person? Well, a person is a rational animal. They're the only rational animal, and everything that's truly a person, that's not some sort of vegetable on a respirator, is, in fact, also a rational animal.
every and only as professor acutely mentioned that's the formal cause and that's of course an important explanatory principle you have to know the what of the thing then there's something he called the material cause that was what we saw the militias working on right what's the basic or stuff what's the physical substrate is it matter is it energy is it water is fire whatever And that is, of course, the whatness. And again, that's a part of explanation. If I was to explain to someone something about, say, this lectern here, one of the things I might well say is, well, it's made of this and this substance. It's made of chipboard with some sort of plastic veneer on it, or whatever kind of veneer we have, whatever the case might be.
The third sort of cause is the sort of cause that we now believe in. It's intuitive to us. It's what he called the efficient cause.
Right, and he says the efficient cause is the agency through which a change occurs. So an example would be, what is the cause of this paper's falling to the ground? Right, the efficient cause would be, I release it. Right?
Good, low-budget, pre-modern science. And again, it's a very intuitive sense. It's whatever preceded the change. Right?
What caused the car wreck? You forgot to hit the brake. All right, what caused the paper to fall? I released it.
And that is, of course, our modern quasi-scientific notion of cause. The last, fourth part of the causal nexus is in many ways the most intriguing and the most unique development in Aristotelian metaphysics. And that is the doctrine of final causality.
The final cause is the end towards which a change occurs. Aristotle as a biologist couldn't help but notice that certain processes have certain natural termination points. You take an acorn, you stick it in the ground, it terminates in an oak tree.
Right? That's the final cause of the growth of the oak tree, the end towards which the acorn moves. And similarly, you can find that in a lot of physical phenomena.
It is, in a way, talking about function. What is the final cause of exercise? Health.
What's the final cause of consumption of food? Satiety. Now, why does he call that final?
Well, one, because it refers to the final state of a series of changes, the final process towards which it works, the purpose of that change. But I want to stress another sense in which we still to this day talk about final causes. Because although we still believe in final causes in biology, we define your heart, for instance, in terms of its purpose, the end towards which it works, it pumps blood throughout your body.
We don't any... more believe in mechanical final causality. Aristotle would have explained the falling of this piece of paper by saying, well, you know, paper loves the earth.
It's natural states the earth. So whenever you release it, it's going to go right down to the earth. We don't quite buy that anymore, but there is enough... another way in which we do buy final causality, i.e. purpose. And to make it intuitive, think of the old joke, why did the chicken cross the road?
What's the answer? To get to the other side. To get to the other side is a purpose it had in mind. And the deep point of calling such a cause final is to say there's no infinite regress. Once you know the purpose of an action, don't say, well, what caused the purpose?
There's no point to it. That's the end state. This is an essential notion for all of subsequent Western moral theory.
Because one of the moral theories that you're going to find is called intentionalism. You judge an action on the basis of the purposes, right? So if you try to do something good, and noble and just, and it doesn't work out, we still give you sort of moral credit, don't we?
So you get an A for effort. And it's because we stop the final, the causal nexus of consequences at the previous state, the end, the purpose towards which you acted. And that is the final cause. And if we treat that cause as final and inexplicable, we're essentially saying there is no cause of your purposes. They are freely assented to, and hence the notion of free will.
Okay, so now we know what the causal nexus is how things interrelate to one another the next thing to find out is what? What kind of things do we find? Aristotle claimed that the essential property of being was unity. It seems bizarre at first, but if you think about it, he's saying, look, everything you find, in a way, is a unity, isn't it?
The human body has a particular shape and form. It describes a unity. If you cut off a hand or an arm, There's something missing.
It's less unified. The arm in itself, however, is not a unity. It's a part of something else. So real being, primary beings, the fundamental entities, are complete. They're whole.
They're self-sufficient. They're unified. They have a unifying structure.
Hence saying that being qua being, pure being, is unity. Now, being of course refers to existence, and Aristotle was aware that we could talk about existence in a lot of different ways. Right? I exist.
I'm a substance, a primary being. But by the same token... There are other things that you could say exist about me. For instance, the color of my clothing, the sound of my voice, the texture of my hair. He says, well now look, which are primary beings and which are accidental to that?
primary being. I'm the primary being. The color of my clothing, texture of my hair, sound of my voice, these are all accidents of my primary being. Thus, we would say in a way that, yeah, it's true whiteness exists and blackness exists and hardness and softness exists, but not in the full sense, in the unified complete sense, the ability to have self-subsistence, that I exist. So Aristotle then identified as his first sort of primary being, the fundamental entities, particular sensible things.
I exist, each of you exist, the lectern exists, the room exists. All of these things are concrete, sensible, material entities. So far that may sound sort of Malaysian, but he goes beyond that. He says, although they are particular and sensible, their particularity and sensibility does not exhaust all of their nature.
There's another part to primary beings like yourself and myself, various objects in the room, and that is their structure, what Plato called form, right, their essence. So now, what he is saying then is each thing which truly exists in the primary sense is a mixture of two elements, matter and form or structure, the ideas. And that's the doctrine of what's called hylomorphism, matter and form put together.
And of course we can think of lots of examples, right? This lectern again is made of a particular material element, substance, maybe wood, chipboard, whatever, and has a particular form, the structure or form of a lectern. And that form in turn is very often defined in functional terms.
terms. Lecterns have the shape and form they do, the structure they do, because they serve a purpose. They're there for me to lean on and hide behind or whatever need I might have of them. Similarly, chairs, right? What's the essence of a chair?
Well, the form of chairness or the essence of chairness, its structure, has a lot to do with its function. It has a bottom and a back so that you can sit on it. That's the function of a chair.
So far we know that sensible beings, sensible entities that come in completion and wholeness are primary beings. Now the question is when we see change in primary beings what is it that changes and what is it that undergoes change? Now remember for Plato forms were eternal.
They were essences which could not be subtracted from or added to. And for that reason, when he separates the forms into a transcendental realm, Aristotle points out, you're completely incapable of explaining change. You're very much in the position of Parmenides, turning to us and saying, you see the apparent changes in the world? Shh, shh, don't look. That's not important.
What's really important are the eternal verities. But change has to be explained, if you're going to be scientific in your analysis of being. And that's why he took the hylomorphic argument he did. What changes?
The matter, the material. And how does it change? It takes on different forms. You start with the form of a boy, in my case, and I have the potential...
to be a man and if I'm properly fed and housed and educated I will eventually change that form to the form of a man of an adult so again it's important to put matter and form together that you can explain change Aristotle also criticized Plato's doctrine of the forms on what I would call the principle of simplicity tidiness Let's return now to Plato's notion of the forms. He's saying for each sort of thing we find out there, there's not only the things, right, the sensible particulars, but there's a form somewhere that corresponds to them. So there's so many people here, and then there's the form of people.
which is something else distinct from the people here. There's so many students of philosophy here, and then there's the general former essence of students of philosophy-ness, student of philosophy-ity, or whatever we're going to call it, floating up there somewhere. And there's a certain point in which Aristotle said, you know, you're creating a real metaphysical slum. I mean, it's difficult enough walking around on this small podium with this lectern here, but I've got to be careful not only not to bump into the lectern, but then there's the form of the lectern to avoid. There may be a form of the form of the lectern.
In fact, every single thing will have a double somewhere in the platonic world of eternals. And this is, in fact, an ontological slum. He took measures to tidy it up. He said put the forms into things.
Don't separate them, don't stick them up in the sky, don't tell me it's pie in the sky. Put them right into things and you do not replicate the number of entities in the universe. Now why should you have, as it were, a cow about replicating the number of entities in the universe?
What's the big deal? So there's eternal forms and particular things of which the forms quote participate. Well, think about scientific explanation. It attempts to create simplicity, to use the smallest number of moving parts to explain a phenomena.
And the principle argues that, and it will be articulated in the late medieval period by William of Ockham, something called Ockham's razor. If we are both explaining a phenomena, and you do it with five entities, and I can explain it just as well with four, mine is the better explanation. The less moving parts you need, the better. Wittgenstein says something to the effect that...
Become a possible across the machine. There's a lot of parts that move in it. There's one part that doesn't seem to really be interconnected with the others It's not part of the machine just yank it out has no function the machine again cut off anything That's not absolutely necessary that scientific simplicity And a wonderful example of this I heard recently was listening to Murray K. Gelman about a year or so ago Gelman I think is actually pronounced who's a physicist he was talking about grand unified theory They're gonna try and take all four of the fundamental forces in nature and reduce them to one. And I asked him, how will you know when you've got the grand unified theory? Because there are some people who believe super string theory is that.
And he said, it's simple. The explanation will be incredibly beautiful and simple. There will be almost no moving parts, an absolute minimum of moving parts.
parts. That's the intuition that Aristotle has as a scientist as well. This metaphysical slum is, as it were, this crowding of extra entities of the good and then the form of the good, and the form of the good, is an impediment to scientific analysis. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, it's completely inimical to explaining change. And consider this, as Plato talks about things participating in the forms.
But things change. Is there a form of change? Forms must be eternal.
But change is transient. So it is literally, a priori, from purely logical grounds, impossible for there to be any change in the world, in reality, if the forms are separate from matter. And that's exactly why Plato quite intelligently said, well, that's... That's why what you're doing right now, you're not participating in reality. It's only when you do math that you participate in reality.
Your lives are just a sham. They're cover of it. And Aristotle just repressed that intuition.
He was a scientific, practical man. He said, no, of course that's not true. This is real.
What we experience is real. now, every minute, every day. This isn't just some small piece of less than real being that participates in the eternal form of the being.
It's here. You can't argue with it. You bang your head into it.
You're not going to get the form of a headache. You'll get a real headache. Similarly Aristotle critiques many of the Platonic and Pythagorean interpretations of numbers.
Now consider how Plato had to treat number because of his doctrine of form. Each number must have its own form, right? So there's the form of the one, the essence of oneness, the essence of two-ness. The essence of threeness the essence of triangularity.
In some cases that makes some sense. We can give an essential definition of triangularity. But Aristotle points out when you get to arithmetic, it actually starts to sound kind of silly.
And he said, think about it. When we run through like primitive number theory, we count thus. We say 1, and then 1 plus 1 is 2, and then 2 plus 1 is 3. And in each case, the next numeral is the iterated successor of the one that preceded it, right?
It's a process of addition. So the 1 and 2 are the same. two are added to make three. But when we count in Platonic number theory, we have the one, which is totally distinct from the one in and of itself, the form of oneness. And now one plus one equals two, but the form of oneness plus the form of oneness can't equal the form of two-ness because it's a distinct essence.
So we count one, two, three in real arithmetic, but in Plato arithmetic, we've got the form of oneness succeeded by something totally distinct and undivisible called the form of two-ness. And then we get to the form of threeness, and on and on. And Aristotle thought that was a real howl.
He had a particularly dry and bizarre sense of humor. Okay, he goes a step farther, right? Because Plato pointed something out. He said, look, numbers are not actually found in nature.
Therefore, they exist in the realm of the intelligible. And that's true. I mean, have you bumped into a three lately? You know, you've been kicking a plus?
No, it doesn't happen that way. And Aristotle took great umbrage at that suggestion. His point was that, look, what we really have in mathematics are not essences that are out there, pie in the sky or something. It's a much simpler process than that. Do things have magnitudes or not?
They do have magnitudes, don't they? We can measure the height of this, we can measure my height, we can measure the distance between things. That's one of the properties of things.
So, what we have in mathematics is we simply abstract from all of the other properties of a thing its magnitude, and speak about it in abstraction. And here is again that fundamental critique he's making of Plato. Plato, you're right about the forms, but don't think that they're subsistent things in and of themselves.
They're abstractions from things. They may be the essence of things, but they're of things. They're in things.
So there are no numbers. somewhere that, you know, when we die we'll go up and find them and hang around in a triangle, maybe sit in a square. It's not like that at all. Squares are properties of cube things that we find.
We abstract from the particular things to the general notion of squareness, triangularity, number theory. And again, that may seem like a very harsh criticism of Plato, but it's not in fact. It's in a strange sense a defense of Plato. He's saying that fundamental intuition of the form, which is a really interesting and innovative idea Plato has, is right. It's just the way he puts it could, to use Philip Roth's expression, make a gorilla blush.
I mean, you can't really expect me to believe that one day I'm going to die, I'm going to go up to the heavens, and there I'm going to find triangularity. I'm going to put squareness in my pocket. It doesn't work that way. So he says, let's keep that intuition, put it in the world, use it to a good cause.
to explain change and then we're in good shape. Now, that still doesn't entirely explain the process of change, right? Because we're back to that Parmenidean problem.
If something is becoming, is changing, What's it changing from? If it's changing from being, how is it that being or existence could go out of existence to become existence again? What you're literally saying is, when I change from a boy to a man, is I start out being a boy, then I stop. Then somehow or other, I show up again like a man. And it's a theoretical problem that Plato sort of stuck under the rug.
Aristotle solved it, or he solved it in a particular way. He said there is actually a middle ground between non-existence and being, full existence. And we'll call that middle ground, or he called it, potentia, potency, potentiality.
So it's not that I'm not a man and then I become a man, which would be absurd because you can't make something out of nothing, but rather a boy is potentially a man. An acorn is potentially a tree. That is under certain common initial conditions.
that thing will move towards its final state, its end state, its final cause, its full development. And many things in nature do have that sort of tendency, don't they? Almost all organic things. And remember, Aristotle was one of the founders of the modern science of biology.
He would have been extremely impressed by such arguments. So a thing's potential is that which, given the correct initial conditions, it will naturally tend to become. And there's a lot of cases in which that makes sense. There's other cases where it doesn't make sense.
Aristotle seriously believed that things fall to the ground because they love the earth. And that's where they belong. And why do birds fly? Well, they tend towards the sky. You let them go and they're just going to float right up.
He would have had a great time with helium balloons and rockets. Now, what's the large-scale implication of this? It's something that's going to become fundamental to the Christian worldview.
If things have natural states they tend towards, they have ends, they have a purpose, don't they? This doctrine is literally what's called teleology. The universe has a purpose.
Food exists to save me. Right? The oak acorn exists to become the oak tree. There's a sort of intelligence throughout the universe, a sort of structure of purpose, of end state, of something moving towards its finality.
Now you can see it's not a very... far reach for say Christian thinkers to realize that or followers of Christ what I call the Christ movement to look at that and say you know Aristotle's right but you know what the real purpose is there's purposes and things but you know who has purposes people do so there's obviously some big person who created everything and there's a purpose to the world And that is of course an intriguing notion which still persists into the common, into our, not only common consciousness, but into the present day. Okay, let's then begin with inanimate objects, primary beings, rocks, stones, lecterns.
Any change that they have can come in one or maybe two forms. Efficient change, like locomotion, right? What is the cause of this thing's motion?
I throw it. That's one sort of change. And again, we find this throughout our common lives, right? What causes the blender to go on?
You push the button. What causes the light to go on? You flick the switch.
What causes the car to accelerate? You hit the gas pedal. And that always requires an outside agency to induce the change. Right? So you have an actor and a patient, that which undergoes change.
Or, inanimate objects can be teleologically moved. Gravitational states, as I suggested. Elements with lightness tend towards the high.
Elements with density tend towards the low. And that's the final teleological cause to nature. But...
When we talk about animate objects, things which are capable of self-induced motion, right? No one is winding me up back here. I'm going to show you.
I've got no windup. No one winds me up so I walk here like a little machine. No efficient cause. I do this on my own.
He says when you have that, animate objects, there is a different form or structure or cause. And he calls that the soul. And we've heard this before, right? The notion that there is, the soul is the cause of motion. But he argues that we find lots of different sorts of motion in organic entities, don't we?
And what he means by motion, first of all, what all the Greeks mean by motion, is not just what they call locomotion, walking around, moving, but change. Any kind of change is motion. So, let's start with plants. They have a kind of soul, don't they?
They grow, they change, they take in food. So Aristotle said that's the first type of soul that exists. Plants have it. It's called a nutritive soul.
What's the next kind of soul? Well, look at animals. Not only do they grow and nutrate, like plants, eat stuff, but they're also capable of moving around, of walking, of running, of sensing. Right? I mean, they perceived their environment.
Aristotle was not confused. Plants don't have eyes or ears. He didn't think, you know, you could sing to a tree and it would hear it and sort of like your song or not like it if you had a nice or not nice voice.
So that's the second sort of soul. The animal soul, or what he called the sensitive soul. The soul which is associated with having sensibility, the ability to sense things.
Then of course there is what we might call the human soul, which is a mixture of those two, plus the ability to speak, to talk, to desire. And finally there is that highest part of the soul that Plato talked about, right, the rational part. And that's the intellective soul.
Now if you think about it, plants only have the first soul, but animals have both of the first two sorts of souls. They both nutriate and move. We have all four, right? We're the top part of being.
And we'll get to that in a moment in the Great Scale of Being. But now, Aristotle takes another step and says, imagine if you will, as if you could take that soul, right, that intellective soul, and imagine it without the other parts. Could there be such a being?
If there were, what would such a being be? And as you can imagine, such a being would be God. And he called the science of the study of such a being, theology, the study of God.
Well, what would be the properties of such a being? Well, it would have to be eternal, right? Therefore, it would have to be an exception to hylomorphism. It couldn't have matter because matter undergoes change. So it would have to be pure form, pure structure, pure soul, pure intellective soul.
Well, granted that such might be the case, is there any reason to believe there actually is such a thing? A sort of disembodied intelligence? Aristotle said yes, on purely rational scientific grounds. All cause must be induced by an outside agency, unless it's teleological from within. And clearly there is much physical, efficient causation in the world.
One thing follows another. Stuff happens, as they say. Well, the problem is, how did the first thing get started?
In Infinite Regress, Aristotle dismissed as completely illogical. I mean, to say, well, it's causes all the way down, it goes back forever, and it's a big circle, he said, that's really kind of poetic and pretty. but you can't expect a scientifically literate person like myself to believe something like that that's a good thing to tell your kids maybe but but don't tell it to adults it must have started something somewhere something must have got the whole machine going right someone must afflict the switch and got it started if there's motion there must be a first mover a prime mover and what would you call that prime mover God, right? That is, in fact, what even in Judeo-Christianity we think God was.
He's the creator of the universe. But now, I've probably given you the sense that Aristotle is very close to our Christian or Judeo-Christian conceptions of divinity. There's a big difference. Aristotle thought that God, because he's perfect, It doesn't create things or motion by pushing things around, but rather teleologically.
Everything desires perfect being, God. So he's the final cause of all activity. Everything occurs because it's trying to get in touch with God in some way.
That's the cause of motion in the universe. That's slightly different than a Christian notion. What's somewhat more starkly different, and perhaps might be in some way troubling to many modern sensibilities, is that his idea of, well, what is God likely to be doing after he started the first motion and acts as the object of desire? We think of God as an eternal sort of omnipotent, loving being who's concerned about us and keeps an eye on us and tries to take care of things, right? He's providential.
But Aristotle says, look, God's perfect. And God's perfect in selection. Now, if you were perfect in selection, what would you think about?
would you think about something like mud? Why waste your time thinking about mud? You must be in the perfect state if you're perfect. So you must be thinking about that which is perfect. So then, what really is God thinking about all the time?
Well, it turns out God's real narcissistic. He spends all day sitting around thinking about himself. Because he's the only thing worth thinking about.
And, you know, it is a sort of funny notion, but I want to give you a sense of the intuition of it that he would have and that subsequent thinkers who accepted Aristotle in this sense of divinity had. Which is, now, seriously, don't you think... I think there's a certain amount of hubris in believing that if there's a great, omnipotent being out there in the sky somewhere, and it created everything, that it's got nothing better to do with its life and its time than follow my paltry life?
Am I that interesting? Aristotle is pointing out that's absurd. Why should God care what happens to you?
Do you think God cares what happens to every little iguana? Do you think God watches the chipmunks to make sure that they have enough acorns or something like that? Nonsense. God can't waste time with another two-legged animal, the featherless biped humans.
God thinks only of himself. It's an internal act of self-contemplation. Basically he gazes at his nature. You know, looks at his own complete perfection. This is necessary because if he were to think of something else, think about it, as a soul, what would he be doing?
He'd be changing mental states. But if he's changing, then he's not perfect. Because to be perfect is to be self-subsistent.
But change comes from outside. So he can't think about anything else because if he did, he wouldn't be self-subsistent and he wouldn't be God. So he has to just sit around all day and think about himself.
Not only that, since he doesn't change, he has no potentiality. There's nothing he moves towards. God is pure actuality.
He's pure essence of soul. And therefore, he is the ultimate primary being. The unmoved, first mover of the cosmos who contemplates himself.
Well, given that, let's put together the whole metaphysical picture, as it were, the big shebang. And it is what you have as the scale of being. We've got at the very bottom the notion of prime matter, right?
Pure material substratum, yet to achieve form. Prime matter is not a primary being, it's just the basic Urstaff of which everything's made. Anaximander is unlimited.
And he recognized that Anaximander obviously had the best idea. Rather than picking one of the elements as basic, it's clearly prime matter itself, which is the most basic. From that come the four elements.
In their particular instantiations, like this chunk of water which I have here, they can be the primary being, this glass of water. But the fundamental primary beings are the particular sensibles, inorganic matter, moving up that scale of being. It has more reality than that which is below it. And the point here is, In a certain sense, this isn't really an object, this glass of water. It's a chunk of an object, the object scattered throughout the universe called water.
There's just a little piece of it. In that sense, it doesn't have a unity. It has a plurality. It's not primary being. It's sort of secondary.
But in organic matter, things which are congealed into particular sensibles, they have primary being. Now, the next obvious question that arises is, why would plants be above inorganic matter on this great scale of being? Well, reason runs something like this.
Both are made of matter and form, but what's the form of inorganic matter, of plants as opposed to inorganic matter? It's its soul. It's nutritive soul. And the soul is a self-causing agency. Therefore, in a certain sense, it's more real, or has more being, more potency, more power, more ability for self-sufficiency than that which precedes it, that being inorganic matter rocks.
And similarly, if that's the case, Then animals would have more being, more reality, more power, more potency than plants. Right? Because they have more processes and more types of soul that they contain.
And finally, or penultimately rather, man, humans. Right? In a sense, we're more real. We have more power, more potency, more actuality than do, say, chipmunks or iguanas. And then ultimate, pure being, pure actuality, never changing, no potency, is God.
Okay, if you've got that, that scale of being, which incidentally, Professor Acuti has mentioned, gets tied up and used to politically legitimate the structures of church, I should point out it was also used in the medieval period to legitimate the structures of state. Right? I mean, think of the scale of being.
Below God, who's going to show up if you're a secular prince? Me, the secular prince. And below me come my nobles. Below them come the citizen burgers. Below them come...
the peasants, the serfs, and just below serfs are things like cattle, horses. So you don't treat serfs quite like, you know, horses, but you don't treat them quite like kings and princes either. And again, a hierarchical scale of being legitimating the political structure. That, in a nutshell, gives you the basic metaphysical views of Aristotle. I want to add one more element, though, which has not traditionally been included in his metaphysics, and that's one of his logical doctrines.
Aristotle, as many of you probably know, was one of the great pathbreakers in the study of logic, of symbolic logic. And, in fact, he really was unpassed until the works of, say, Cantor and Boole in the... 19th century. Up to that point his work in the syllogism remained the fundamental fundamental canonical text in logical analysis. Well the interesting point to bring out about Aristotle and logic is that Aristotle was a realist.
That is to say that anything we talk about and can predicate as true must really exist somewhere. So if we can make true statements about logical forms, as for instance, what are the inferences one can draw from a conditional, an if-then statement, or from a disjunctive, an either-or statement, or a conjunctive, an and statement. That means that there must be something real that corresponds to that.
That must be, logic must be, a structure not only in mind, but in the universe, in nature and in the world. And that caches in the hylomorphism, right? You're both matter and form.
Everything else is matter and form. How do you understand the matter of the world? It, through the senses, interacts with your matter. That's what apprehends the matter. How do you apprehend the form?
Well, you've got the identical form structure up here. So, I look at you and I see the form of a man, and that sort of form jumps out, goes through my eyes, and connects to the form of man concept in my brain. And I've got knowledge.
So therefore, if we can come up with, let's say, a set of logical categories you could use to describe the world, they would not only be descriptive, in the sense that they're taxonomic logical functions, but they're actually properties of things in themselves. And here, he had exactly nine. He said substance, right, something is there, a man or a dog. Quantity, right, how much extension it has, how much magnitude. It's quality, whether it's blue or white or green.
It's relation to others in kind, it's twice as big as the other one, it's below the other one, which of course leads to the next one. Posture, prone, standing, erect. Period, this happened last year, happened next year. Act, opposite. I threw this across the room, acted upon, this got thrown across the room.
And finally, position. We are here in Washington, D.C. He not only said that those were things you could say about things, but they were things in the world themselves. They were absolutely essential properties, or not quite essential, but nonetheless real properties of things in and of themselves. And that doctrine of realism will become one of the major bones of contention in the subsequent philosophic tradition. In addition to which, those nine categories, that idea that there's a structure in the universe, a structure that's identical to it in our logical analysis, ...becomes one of the fundamental themes that will be resolved, or at least attacked, by Immanuel Kant.
Kant also believed there were categories, but came up with the rather unique idea that, you know what, maybe those categories are just up here. Maybe they're not out there. But until Kant, that remains an extremely problematic assertion.