ARISTOTELISM AS THE BASIS OF THE WESTERN WORLD VIEW

Abstract

There are reasons to believe that the teachings of Aristotle, his way of thinking, had a significant impact on the formation of certain basic structures of the Western worldview and the thinking of Western people. The features of Aristotle's thinking patterns include: egocentrism in the basis of understanding of reality; phenomenologism (use of forms and phenomena in theoretical constructions without reference to essence); attitude to form as a self-sufficient principle, in isolation from the content; Aristotelian method of thinking suggests similarity, but does not imply the possibility of equalities, identities; therefore, in the Aristotelian picture of the world, the structure of the world is possible only as hierarchical; the use of causality that is close to everyday - teleological - causality, which leads to an understanding of the world as a system of fixed places, with its “embedded” a priori goals; a combination of two schemes in a world picture - hierarchism and a system of places - gives rise to an idea of the world as a hierarchical system of fixed places; this is how the physical, social and mental worlds are understood; the idea of the world as a hierarchical system of fixed places leads to a general scheme of understanding the world, which serves as a matrix for understanding other objects (for example, a person): the world has a center and periphery, with the center being the bottom and the top being the periphery; in the centrality of the lower and the peripherality of the higher there is a deep ambivalence; negation of infinity denies the possibility of any other picture of the world, and contains an implicit denial of the reality of the world. These mental schemes can be regarded to some extent as a key to Western thinking and the Western picture of the world.