Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation by Henry B. Veatch

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Aristotle: .A Contemporary .Appreciation. By HENRY B. VEATCH. Blooming~ ton, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1974. Pp. ~14. $7.95 cloth, $~.95 paper. While this book is addressed primarily to those students of philosophy who have read, but have not seriously studied Aristotle, it is also a book from which much can be learned even by those more familiar the Philosopher . One reason for this is the point of view from which Aristotle is presented. Being one of those rare Aristotelians nowadays who is thoroughly knowledgeable of contemporary analytic philosophy, Prof. Veatch is in a position to show how Aristotelianism can be a " live option " in philosophy today. And this he does by arguing that Aristotle's appeal to "common sense " is, as Veatch puts it, " an antidote to the alienations of both modern science and and modern philosophy." Thus, in being shown how and in what senses Aristotle holds his own vis avis contemporary philosophy , even the expert in Aristotle can, by reading Veatch's book, gain a new appreciation of "the master of those who know." Dubbing Aristotle as " the philosopher of common sense," i. e., the philosopher who goes by the axiom that what most men most of the time take to be true is likely to be true in fact, Veatch goes on to show in succeeding chapters how this principle of common sense guides Aristotle 's thought in his physics, ethics, metaphysics, and logic. Veatch's theme throughout is that, in contrast with the kind of program Aristotle offers us in these areas, the world presented to us by contemporary philosophy and science is a " world that humanly and commonsensically we simply cannot live in." Beginning then with Veatch's account of Aristotle's physics, we find the author rightly unfolding Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes in the context of change or becoming. Veatch not only shows how Aristotle's view of change is an answer to the Heraclitean, Parmenidean, and Zenonian views on the same subject but, what is more intriguing and important for what he is about, he also contrasts Aristotle's view of causality with the modern view of causality stemming from Hume. Specifically, Veatch points out that, unlike modern and contemporary philosophers, Aristotle held that an efficient cause and its effect are simultaneous, so that for Aristotle it is not true to say that a cause precedes its effect in time. This temporal separation of an effect from its cause in modern philosophy has, Veatch suggests, precluded any explanation as to just why a certain event B follows another event A. As Veatch puts it: ". . . Substitute for this notion of 14~ BOOK REVIEWS 148 causation the one of a cause as preceding its effect, and there is no way in which there can be either any causal action on anything or anything for the cause to act upon. Rather, when the effect comes into being, the cause will already have ceased to be. Hence there is no way in which an efficient cause can any longer be thought of as acting upon something so as actually to bring about its proper effect with the result that the whole panoply of efficient, material, formal, and final causes simply goes out the window." (pp. 58-54) Turning next to Aristotle's philosophy of animate and human beings Veatch concentrates on Aristotle's account of knowledge. First he attributes to Aristotle the following realistic dicta: (1) that things in the world are what they are independently of our attitudes toward or opinions about them, and (~) that despite the errors to which we are prone, we human beings are capable of knowing things as they are in themselves. Accepting knowledge as a fact, Aristotle explains how that fact is possible. In showing how he does this, Veatch discusses knowledge, as he did causality, in the context of change. Knowledge and physical change both involve the reception of form by something that is in potency to that form. The difference between these two changes is that whereas something's receiving the form of red involves its actually becoming red, my coming to know red does not involve my actually becoming red. The reason...